Mounting NFS shares on the Mvix
Requirements for this feat includes a modified firmware that has telnetd support and some locally attached storage, either an internal drive or an USB drive. The standard uClinux kernel used by firmware 1.1.25 (and hopefully above) has NFS support compiled in by default. So really all we have to do is be a bit smart with respect to mount points and we can access all our NFS shares from the Mvix GUI.
0. NFS export a file system to your Mvix. Exercise left to the reader.
1. Locate a suitable mount point somewhere that the GUI will see. The easiest way of doing this is having an internal disk and creating a directory on that, since the GUI will let you traverse all such disks. Mine is ext3 formatted, so I can do this while logged in.
way:/tmp/ide/part1# df
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 6986 6986 0 100% /
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 283855840 215820 268988340 0% /tmp/ide/part1
Create the mount point
way:/tmp/ide/part1# mkdir /tmp/ide/part1/data
Verify that it’s been created
way:/tmp/ide/part1# ls /tmp/ide/part1/data
Mount a remote share. Note the nolock option, since the device does not have relevant supporting daemons running. Mounting using IP-numbers instead of hostname like I use here is perfectly fine.
way:/tmp/ide/part1# mount home:/data /tmp/ide/part1/data -o nolock
way:/tmp/ide/part1# df
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 6986 6986 0 100% /
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1283855840 215820 268988340 0% /tmp/ide/part1
home:/data 1730627 1581398 149228 91% /tmp/ide/part1/data
Now press Refresh in the GUI and browse the internal HDD. You will see your data directory and have access to all the files that are in this NFS share. And it’s much faster than fetching files over CIFS, so watching 720p material for example will be much smoother than before.
Hopefully they’ll include the proper daemons in some future firmware, so that the mount doesn’t take five minutes. Then it will be worth hacking the firmware to automount your NFS disks at boot.
April 12th, 2008 at 22:48
[...] with the default settings all it could see are Windows shares (bite me) so I found this on the web: MVix NFS-enabled firmware. I applied this and within a reboot I had out NAS units displaying nicely. Cost was around $400 and [...]
July 30th, 2008 at 14:47
Reading the above, sounds all confusing to a non Unix/Linux user.
No offence taken, but using Microsoft Vista and MVIX760 HD with firmware 2.0.3.1. and wireless enabled with “success”.
I use Windows Commander to ftp to the MVIX with success over a wireless access point. However, I experience problems copying files from PC to the MVIX and receive an FTP error 553.
Config: MVIX - internall HDD - 500GB reformatted as FAT32 (since FTP can not write to NTFS).
Is there a way to NFS mount to the MVIX rather, hence to share directories on the MVIX so that one can mount to it from XP.
Maybe it can;t be done, mayb e it can be done…..
August 31st, 2008 at 05:36
[...] with the default settings all it could see are Windows shares (bite me) so I found this on the web: MVix NFS-enabled firmware. I applied this and within a reboot I had our NAS units displaying nicely. Cost was around $400 and [...]