Yep, you make it look simple. Thanks for the 'Cut-to-the-chase' explanation. I'll modify that slightly to get my 3 linux boxes talking to each other. And even my son can have at my Videos if he figures out how to do it from Windows . Of course I won't tell him about Samba - that would make life easy for him and messy for me.

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I use sshfs to share files between mi openwrt with mi video files and my computers.

As easy than mount on local the remote openwrt dir.

Install sshfs , then:

In case you don't want to set up more service.

It is an other option, and maybe work with windows.

@rkselsen: I started setting that up here. I have backups on /mnt/hd normally, but /mnt/hd/Videos is a separate partition and that didn't show, so I gather I have to list each partition separately?

I gather the client needs to have /etc/rc.d/rc.rpc running?

Am I better putting nfs mounts in /etc/fstab? Let me see.....
I reckon it's best to run 2 servers here between my 3 boxes which will make backups & even remote installs a bit lazier when coupled with ssh.

@viel: Thanks for that. I've actually been using rsync for file transfer with good success which only requires a user password and no setup. Problem is, my sbc has a well-deserved hostname: I called it sparrowfart, because it's computing power is inconsequential.

You could export and mount those different partitions separately or you could experiment with the "nohide" option in /etc/exports (see man exports).

Putting nfs mounts in fstab for automatic mount at boot is an option. Adding options like "noauto" and "user" to a line in fstab might make it easier to manually mount and umount. However, when it comes to NFS I really like the automounter which you can enable with:

With the line:

in /etc/auto.master and the default distributed /etc/auto.net in Slackware you can then simply do things like:

The automounter will mount those directories when you use them and umount them when no longer needed.

A good advice is also to carefully choose your computers which get the trust to become NFS servers. If an NFS server hangs or is shutdown, all cliens having mounted directories from the NFS server will suffer. Only such a simple thing as typing "df" in a terminal window might make you lose the prompt in that window with df being hung in a "D" state.

regards Henrik

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I'm guessing that autofs goes some way to mitigate this?

What autofs does is that unused file systems will be umounted. So your client will not hang if you haven't used the file system for a while when a server goes down. However, only a simple thing like having a terminal window where you have made cd to a remote file sytem will keep that file system mounted with automount.

regards Henrik

Well, I have the nfs bit sort of working, but I'm snookered by the power saving setup on this box. Mate is OTT with power saving; XFCE is the reverse. And the box won't stay up in Mate. long enough to do any useful transfers. I'm going to run a separate thread on the power saving if I can't sort it myself.

The one box that stays on 24/7 is my Razpi, and that ticks over at about 500 MHz and only uses ~10W when idling. It strikes me I should get some more storage on to it.

/Later

Power saving issues seem sorted. I've set up the drives in various /etc/fstabs, and get a modest but not massive improvement because the network now becomes the limiting factor. But this setup allows remote copying to/from 2 remote boxes, which is nice. It also motivated me to get the power saving sorted out.

I didn't realise the nfs scripts were not in any of the rc files, so I have them in rc.local & rc.local_shutdown.

If you mean /etc/rc.d/rc.nfsd, it's started in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet2 and stopped in rc.6 (and rc.K).

Thank you for pointing that out. I thought rc.inet2 was for all the crazy daemons & exotica that nobody ever uses. It appears I was wrong.

For remote file transfers, I've found Filezilla best. Is in slackbuild. Uses SFTP protocol. You can delete remote files and directories, manage a queue, transverse the remote file system, select files you want added to the download queue, multiple simultaneous file transfers for folks with the bandwidth. I use it to push updates to the boxen on my home network and manage my web site. I switched from rpc. I suggest everyone using rpc do that.

Good to know. I'm hardly going to set it up for the time saving here though, as the volume transferred is low, but the convenience of networking it is huge for me. I'm getting another pair of mains network adapters which are fater than wifi. I can understand the sense commercially, but I'm in the slow lane.