Anyone know of a free NFS client for Windows?

Yeah, I second that one... Anyone?

nfsAxe is $40, that's the best deal I know.

http://labf.com/nfsaxe/index.html

What exactly do you want the client to do?
I hacked together a simple client a while back but it was a command line FTP client style thing. I never bothered to learn how to use the Windows DDK to make a proper IFS.

- Trevor

Pretty sure it doesn't exist. Samba on the server side is probably your best bet.

Why would you want that? NFS isn't designed to be used on windows machines and causes problems in the long term. There's also no security in native NFS, so an extention was made called PCNFS, which would add some kind of authentication at mount time; I have seen a client which could use native NFS though. You can download a 15 day evaluation demo at www.xlink.com
Please note that you abondon file-security when NFS-exporting filesystems to windows clients ( also true for unmanaged linux clients ).

If you have a unix server, running NFSd is "easy", while configuring smd is "hard" (actually, I don't used nfs, but I found samba to be fragile, potentially due to how I'm using it). There's support for Linux ext2, for AFS, and for Arla for Windows; Something that supports NFS doesn't seem that outlandish.

The problems with using NFS on Windows are the same problems that come from using SMB on Unix. Mostly, it becomes very hard to map usernames. IIRC, PCNFS was developed before Windows had usernames, so it was initially much easier.

Guest access was fine, but my problem was samba silently not working. I eventually fixed it but every samba upgrade I've done I've needed to unbreak it (same config every time, modulo tweaking).

Yeah, but even a guest has to map to some user.

Every unix host I have has "nobody". Guess what guest maps to?

Hmm, well I don't really have a need for an NFS client considering the array controller has now made the data inaccessable anyhow.

New question. I want to move my OS from an 18 gb drive to a 9 gb drive. I can't add additional drives to the machine that contains the OS, but I can still spit an image out to another linux box via NFS. The system currently has three partitions that make up the OS, /boot, swap space and /. Would recreating the partition structure on a new drive in the other box, then use tar be best, or would dd somehow be useful?

dd'ing the disk device would generate an image of the filesystem, which includes information about how large the filesystem is. Which means that if you were copying it to a partition that was exactly the same size, then it would work. Otherwise, it wouldn't work[1]. However, there's still not a lot of point in doing that, since it'll also copy over all of the unused space in the filesystem. That is, if you had a 10GB filesystem but only 10MB of it was in use, you'd still be copying over 10GB of data (although it would probably compress pretty well ).

If you were using a filesystem that had a robust dump/restore implementation, I'd suggest using that, but I don't think any Linux filesystem does[2]. So go with tar or cpio.

That was longwinded, huh?

[1] Actually, it would work if the destination partition were larger, but you'd be throwing away the use of the extra space. So it would either not work or be inefficient.

[2] Looks like XFS does, if you're using that. I think that that's it, though. ext2 has one, but it doesn't work too well in my experience, and ReiserFS doesn't have one at all, and if there was ever a filesystem that needed a good backup utility, it's Reiser.

True, but the reason why you shouldn't use NFS on a public network is that you will lose all filesecurity. native NFS leaves all security checking at the client side. Imagine a linux box where you've got a root account. You could use su to switch to anyone's userid and access his data. There can be some restrictions for files owned by root, but source-routing and ARP-spoofing can get around that...

Well, there are some ways to secure NFS even on a public network, but you're right. What I was saying was just the one related issue of how PCNFS dealt with trying to secure NFS.