NFS setup doesn't really require programming knowledge....it's more a question of learning some basic working with UNIX commands. You may need to grab some special free utilities to do this stuff if you're working off a PC rather than a Mac, I'm not sure. You'd need some way to connect to your NAS via SSH (I believe there's something like "OpenSSH" for Windows users; or perhaps it can even be done from a CMD window?)
Here's how I set up NFS on my Synology NAS:
1. I went into my NAS's administrator interface the normal way, and enabled NFS in its control panel. I then went to my Shared Folders section in the control panel, and made sure they each were set to allow "*" as incoming connections (in the NFS Permissions tab). You'll likely have something similar to this on your NAS, I assume.
2. I then opened a Terminal window on my Mac laptop, and ssh'ed into the NAS as root ("ssh
[email protected]").
3. I typed "cat /etc/exports" to see what parameters were set by the NAS for my NFS shares. In my case, it looked something like this:
Code:
/volume3/photos *(rw,async,no_wdelay,no_root_squash,insecure_locks,anonuid=0,anongid=0)
/volume3/tvshows *(rw,async,no_wdelay,no_root_squash,insecure_locks,anonuid=0,anongid=0)
/volume3/movies *(rw,async,no_wdelay,no_root_squash,insecure_locks,anonuid=0,anongid=0)
Looked okay to me. So I tried connecting to the NAS from XBMC (set up a source to connect to the NFS filesystem as its media folder), and it failed. I looked at the xbmc.log, and it had an error to the effect of "permission denied." So I typed "vi /etc/exports", which opens up the exports file in the UNIX vi text editor. This is where the basic knowledge of UNIX comes in; you can just google "vi basic commands" and you'll get all you need to know to move around vi, which is incredibly archaic as a text editor.
(Quick digression to list some simple info about vi:
Basically, once you're in vi, you have two modes: an insert mode where you can type text, and a command mode where you type commands preceded by a colon (":"). You switch between the modes with the ESC key. For instance, once you type some text on a line, you can then press ESC to go to command mode, and type ":wq" to "write-quit"--i.e., save the file and quit. You need to enter commands to do things like delete a word or a character, delete a line, insert a new line, and so on; you can't do those things from the "insert text" mode, like you would with a normal word processor.)
Once into the exports file, I added "insecure" to the list of parameters for each share. That made it look like this (I bolded it to point it out; you don't have to put it in any particular spot in the list order):
Code:
/volume3/photos *(rw,async,no_wdelay,[b]insecure[/b],no_root_squash,insecure_locks,anonuid=0,anongid=0)
/volume3/tvshows *(rw,async,no_wdelay,[b]insecure[/b],no_root_squash,insecure_locks,anonuid=0,anongid=0)
/volume3/movies *(rw,async,no_wdelay,[b]insecure[/b],no_root_squash,insecure_locks,anonuid=0,anongid=0)
Saved the file, rebooted my NAS (important step!!!), tried again, and it worked
. I just didn't want to forget the technical background for getting nfs to work with xbmc - i think that is why the nfs wiki is what it is now ... technical 