Inchoate Curmudgeon

Yesterday in “Using ZFS and NFS with Textmate and Finder on a Fusion VM” I stated that “SAMBA would be … the only reasonable setup if you are doing something like this with a Windows machine and VMware Workstation.” This was a bit of an overstatement, since you can configure an NFS client on a Windows machine to do this sort of thing. Also, it appears as though Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) is now freely available from Microsoft, apparently under a combination of LGPL, GPL, and a Microsoft EULA.

I didn’t do complete testing of the scenarios we went through yesterday, but did establish that you can use the SFU NFS client to connect to a Solaris VM as root and a regular user. Since I don’t have VMware workstation setup on a Windows machine, this connectivity testing was done between a Windows XP VM on ESX and the Solaris Nevada VM on my Mac running Fusion.

Note that an SFU NFS connection processes all requests as the authenticating user, meaning basically you can’t “su” or log in as another user on the Windows machine and have that user id automagically map to the equivalent id on the Solaris VM.  You would need to create another map and authenticate as that user. This is probably a minor inconvenience for most uses.

I still think that SAMBA/CIFS is probably a better choice for Windows users attempting to fuse the Solaris server and developer workstation filesystems for a typical development environment. I’ll pursue some example configurations along these lines and post my results.

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