Summary
Having problems with using NFS on Windows 7? Here's a very simple solution.

Lately I've been using NFS to connect to a share on my Fedora virtual machine due to "shared folder" and Samba limitations. However, my virtual machine is not always available. Windows being Windows, if you follow the recommended procedures for mounting your NFS share (assuming Client for NFS is enabled [to begin with -- grief -- only on Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise]; it's installed but disabled by default -- more grief), Windows Explorer will become unresponsive. Also, rebooting will not fix the problem as Explorer will make it a permanent drive mapping. For the grand finale of grief, you'll need to modify the registry to fix access permissions from the Windows client.

All of the recommendations I found said to use the mount/umount command-line programs, installed with Client for NFS, for managing drive mappings. As I discovered, this was the source of Explorer's hanging. The solution is instead to perform the following when connecting:

net use <drive_letter>: <address_of_machine_with_share>:/<location>/<of>/<share> /persistent:no

and for disconnecting:

net use <drive_letter>: /delete

Thank goodness for that Windows for Workgroup certification, otherwise I wouldn't have made the connection and tried "net use"! Hope this saves someone else from similar hours of grief!

Talk Back!

Have an opinion? Be the first to post a comment about this weblog entry.

RSS Feed

If you'd like to be notified whenever Dale Asberry adds a new entry to his weblog, subscribe to his RSS feed.

Digg | del.icio.us | Reddit

About the Blogger

R. Dale Asberry been hacking since 1978, professionally since 1990. He's certified in Java 1.1 and has a four digit MCP number. He discovered Jini at the 2000 JavaOne and has been building incredibly cool, dynamic, distributed architectures ever since! Over time, he's discovered several principles that have contributed to his success - they are the Princples of: Enabling Others, Simplicity, No Complaining, Least Work, Least Surprise, Least Damage, and "It Just Works".