[Klug-general] Baffled by Kubuntu networking

[Mike Evans]

Just for the record:

I have until recently used NFS from my Ubuntu laptop into my Fedora 
Desktop as server.  The NFS server comes installed as standard on 
Fedora.  However some configuration was required to fix the ports NFS 
uses for its various bits and bobs rather than have them floating 
around.  This is because Fedora also comes with an activated firewall, 
and it is no fun at all trying to open holes in a firewall for things 
that keep moving around.

The original Ubuntu install was 7.10 and as I mentioned in an earlier 
post does NOT come with the NFS client installed as standard.  (As Dan A 
says - they expect you to use Samba.)  Installing it was a simple issue 
of using apt-get from the command line - but I'm sure you could use the GUI.

Finally my preference was to give Ubuntu a clue as to what NFS 
filesystems you might want to mount.  That required a simple text edit 
as superuser of /etc/fstab.  I added it as a non-automounted drive, but 
allowed users to mount it.  I then found that by adding the mounter 
applet to the toolbar you would get an option to mount it on demand from 
there.  I had not issues with this when I upgraded to more recent 
versions of Ubuntu, and I'm now on 9.10.

Not so simple when upgrading my Fedora from 8 to 12 recently and for 
some reason I couldn't get it to work.  Then Oly pointed out the 
simplicity of sshfs.  This effectively requires no installation or 
configuration from anywhere as long has you have OpenSSH installed - at 
least using Gnome and Nautilus. YMMV with KDE as I've not tried.

All I had to do was select "connect to server" from the file menu, 
select a service type of SSH, and fill in the login details to the 
remote machine, adding a bookmark at the same time.  Because Nautilus 
will keep the login details in your keyring all you have to do in future 
is use the bookmark to access the filesystem.

Of course this is only really suitable for occasionally mounted 
filesystems and there is presumably some way of specifying an sshfs 
mount in /etc/fstab.

As a result I've not bothered finding out what I did wrong in my Fedora 
12 setup and I'm not using NFS any more.  This also has the advantage of 
freeing me from keeping my user and group ids aligned on the machines 
involved, which is a right royal pain on Ubunutu, which has used the 
Debian convention of starting user numbering at 1000 rather than 500 
like Fedora, but then hard-coding that value into some programs so that 
changing it in the configuration files has no effect. Grr, only children 
and Visual Basic programmers hard code values into programs.

MikeE