NFS problems

[number_one]

I’m new to FOG and I’m having a bear of a time trying to get what should be a pretty basic thing working–modifying the default storage group to point to remote storage.

Here’s my situation. I’m running FOG in a Virtualbox VM (Ubuntu 12.04) on a Windows 7 platform (will later be moved to a Windows 2008R2 Server after testing). I have a large SMB share on the Windows Server that I want to use for image storage. I’d rather not have to get into setting up NFS on the Window Server for a variety of reasons, so I’ve mounted the SMB share on the FOG server directly (/mnt/win/fogimages). Up to that point everything is fine. The mount works and I can manually see/edit data on the share via command line. The share is mounted such that the fog user is owner with 644 permissions.

Now comes the FOG configuration. Based on a variety of WIKI and other sources here is what I have done to modify the default storage group.

1. Edit the DefaultMember storage node settings in the web GUI. All I did here was change the “Image Path” to point to “/mnt/win/fogimages”

2. Updating the /var/www/fog/commons/config.php file with below:
   [CODE]define(‘STORAGE_DATADIR’, ‘/mnt/win/fogimages/’);
   define(‘STORAGE_DATADIR_UPLOAD’, ‘/mnt/win/fogimages/dev/’);[/CODE]

3. Updating /etc/exports as such:
   [CODE]/mnt/win/fogimages *(ro,sync,no_wdelay,insecure_locks,no_root_squash,insecure,fsid=1)
   /mnt/win/fogimages/dev *(rw,sync,no_wdelay,no_root_squash,insecure,fsid=2)[/CODE]
   And then restarting NFS services.

So, after all that, the web GUI reflects the proper free space and everything seems to be great. But upon booting a client to upload an image I get the following error:[QUOTE]* Mounting File System…Failed

mount: mounting 192.168.50.80:/mnt/win/fogimages/ on /images failed: Permission denied[/QUOTE]

So, just for kicks I tried to mount the FOG NFS share from another Linux machine. No go there either–it just hangs trying to mount.

Can anyone give any direction? All I want to do is use a Windows share for image storage. A variety of blogs seem to have accomplished this in the past, so I don’t know if there is something going on with v1.0.x different than previous versions in this area.

[Tom Elliott]

Check your /etc/exports file.

It’s probably set to point at /images and /images/dev

Change these names to:
/mnt/win/fogimages
/mnt/win/fogimages/dev respectively.

Also make sure the permissions are correct for these folders with:
[code]touch /mnt/win/fogimages/{.mntcheck,/dev/.mntcheck}
chmod 777 -R /mnt/win/fogimages[/code]

Once you make the switch on the /etc/exports file restart the nfs server with:
[code]service nfs restart[/code]

If you’re on ubuntu try with:
[code]sudo service nfs-kernel-server restart[/code]

[number_one]

I’ll check permissions again, but as noted in the first post I did update /etc/exports with the new locations.

[number_one]

I’m thinking it may have something to do with the fact that the folder is already a remote CIFS mount. The more I look into this it appears that there has never been support in Linux for re-exporting a CIFS share through NFS.

Given that premise, is there an alternative to NFS for FOG? Since I already have the CIFS shares, is there a way to have FOG point to a CIFS share instead of using NFS? I’d rather not have to deal with setting up Windows NFS services–it’s pretty clear in the forums that it is something quite a few people have had problems with, and I’d rather not introduce another service that needs to be maintained.

[Tom Elliott]

I have an nfs shared through cifs, but not the other way.