I honestly don’t know if I should laugh or cry, it’s really that bad but I’m laughing my ass off right now lol.
Like last week I set up Microsofts Services For UNIX 3.5 on my XP machine, configured user/group maps from my Windows XP user account to my account on the OpenBSD server with the NFS shares. I followed the documentation that came with the software to get it set up.
If I try to access \vectrasrvnfs through Windows Explorer I either get an error message or I get the files, or I get BOTH. And trying to even right click to highlight any thing in Windows Explorer causes lock ups for several seconds. If I use the IP address rather then the alias ‘vectra’ that I setup in %SystemRoot%System32Driversetchosts it works slightly faster if I try to use the dir command in the command prompt which is stupid.
When I try to map the share to a network drive in Windows Explorer it dies with an error at \vectrasrvnfs, but I can ‘browse’ for it and then use it some times. It also ignores the maps I set up in the graphical SFU admin program so I can’t access files — and still buggers up when I tell it the login datam.
So finally pissed off after a week of this lag & lock crap, I open a command prompt with SFU’s shell and check the mount commands documentation which tells me to use the Windows Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) syntax for the file paths.
mount \vectrasrvnfs N:
And I get an error message about \vectrasrvnfs being an invalid command line argument to mount. So I for the hell of it I try the unix style host:share syntax to see if that works.
mount vectra:/srv/nfs N:
and BOOM it friging works !!!
I open windows explorer and go to N: in the nav bar and it works QUICKLY just like the NFS Shares mounted on my PC-BSD system do. Now my NFS shares are working through Windows Explorer properly, not like a piece of garbage as it was when doing through the GUI on Windows.
THE IRONY OF IT ALL !?
Microsoft Windows is noted by some people for giving easy, graphical ways to do things that ‘unix’ systems are supposed to lack quality documentation.
I used the ‘easy’, ‘graphical’ interfaces in Windows to do what takes 2 seconds in Unix which is ‘supposed’ to lack documentation and it works like shit or not at all in Windows.
I used the ‘hard’, ‘command line’ like way on Windows, only to find that the ‘supposed’ good documentation is wrong, and guess what — Doing it from the command line on Windows works ____better____ then the GUI once you figure it out.
Time to roll on the freaking floor laughing until my sides hurt !!!!