NFS Server on Windows 8 ???


PowerGod

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Hi, I need to share things to a VM but the included functionality of Virtualbox has some issues... so I was thinking about an NFS share (I always heard about it but never used)...

The problem is that I have Windows 8 HOME ... and seems like nothing from Microsoft regarding NFS could be installed in it...

So I'll need to use third party tools, and my research gave small results... I can't find many tools for Win8, and the ones I found seems "unknown" to the most... and also there's a general lack of documentation...

I found these things that "should" work on Win8:

- FreeNFS (http://freenfs.sourceforge.net/)
- Cygwin SHOULD have something, but I'm using the 64bit version and I can't understand if there's everything needed or just some incomplete parts, there's no documentation at all, or at least is really hidden...
- Allegro NFS Server for Windows (https://github.com/franzinc/nfs) that must be used in Cygwin

I found some Cygwin guides to set up an NFS server, but everyone of them are really old and uses commands that are not included in the repo...
I found "nfs-server" and "unfs3" packages but then I see no new services added... also there are no configuration utilities...

And then there's that "Allegro NFS Server" that I wonder if it's needed or not, after all there should already be everything I need in the cygwin repo...

Is there anyone who uses these tools and could give some advice ?

Thanks
 
If you need to copy things from one to the other, consider babyftp. (in the past, you could combine it with NetDrive to have a driveletter to the FTP, but that seems to be non free now). Try this procedure FTP to Driveletter
Not sure if it would work for Cygwin, but consider SSHFS for Windows. (Works on the Pandora :) )

You can always assign a usbstick to the VM, and unmount, and mount it on the host again (lots of work though)

What OS is your virtual machine? (Your Host is Win8home, but the VM?)
What exactly are the issues?

At work I use SuperPutty (GUI wrapper around putty). It has a very simple file copier (using the winscp).

If your VMclient is Linux, consider a graphical GUI for administrating the box, like WebMin (makes your Samba life easier if you go the Samba, overkill, route)
 
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Does anyone use NFS any more? I've not heard of anyone using that for at least five years now. Everyone else seems to have settled on either SSHFS or CIFS/Samba for more permanent shares, or like me uses scp for ad hoc copies using remote user accounts (or a common split public key pair installed across the source machine and the target user account).
 
My intention is to use the shared folders "synced" between the host and the guest, because I can actively work on them with both systems... so a USB solution or something to constantly mount/unmount is not what I'm searching...
I was happy with the Virtualbox share if it wasn't for the fact that it keeps some files locked while the guest is working on them...

So Samba is faster than NFS ? I was thinking the contrary after reading some random review over the internt
I don't even know what CIFS is... I'll need to have some reading... about SSHFS too... I always use SSH, but I don't know how it could work "mounted"... maybe there's something in the Cygwin repo...
 
For a quick copy you can use WinSCP, a graphical tool for copying stuff from and to ssh servers for Windows.
For the final solution, share a folder on your windows machine and mount it in your vm.
What OS is your VM?
In linux you can install cifs-tools and then mount the Windows Share.
@levi NFS has a smaller footprint than smb/cifs and has it's advantages in clustered vm surroundings together with iSCSI, where you share virtual harddrives between hosts.
I think you already knew that, but I just wanted to show, that there is still an actual use case.
 
Here is a good tutorial:
https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Backup/en

Just ask if you got problems and don't forget the cifs-tools.

Also on debian create the wheel group with addgroup (or groupadd) wheel.

you also need to add the smb version for windows 8. Thats the vers=3.0 at the end.

Here is an example fstab mount:
//<Benutzername>.your-storagebox.de/backup /mnt/backup-server cifs iocharset=utf8,rw,credentials=/etc/backup-credentials.txt,uid=<Systemkonto>,gid=<Systemgruppe>,file_mode=0660,dir_mode=0770,vers=3.0 0 0
 
@FBnil : these are not exactly what I need for this purpose, but thanks anyway, I already know some situations where I could use them.

By the way, seems like the last Cygwin update I did screwed up the entire installation somehow (missing DLLs, zero size scripts, etc...)... luckily manually selecting to reinstall EVERY single package I had solved everything !!
(to see the entire list from the setup I had to use the "up to date" list, because "picked" didn't show the default ones)
 
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