NFS is better than CIFS (at least for streaming video) or How and why to use NFS instead of CIFS on Mac OS X

For the longest time, I thought that my wifi connection was just too slow. Trying to play a movie with VLC player was just painful! I was trying to play movies and it would buffer for a long time and while it was playing, would stop for a little while, pixelate, and play again. I just finished gave up on it for a long time. I bought a new router, a Netgear Nighthawk 802.11ac router that was supposed to be much faster. Unfortunately I didn’t look at my MacBook Pro specs and see that my wireless on the laptop didn’t support 802.11ac! No problem though – still keeping the router. The range on the router is much better than my old Belkin Play N600.

Just for the heck of it yesterday I decided that maybe NFS would be better than CIFS. I worked at Sun Microsystems for 4 1/2 years. I should’ve known this!

I think I tried using NFS on Mac a while back and it didn’t work and I just gave up. The error I got was this one:

Screen Shot 2014-06-09 at 12.35.19 PM

 

I’m glad I revisited this. Because of this error, I just figured that Finder didn’t mount NFS. Since Mac OS X does include showmount however, I thought maybe it does it via command line.

Doing a quick google search, I found that to mount NFS, because Linux wants the server to use ports <1024 and Mac OS X wants >1024, you need to use the ” -o resvport” option when doing the mount via command line.

sudo mount -t nfs -o resvport 192.168.0.11:/home/Monster /s

You don’t need to do it that way. Finder works just just fine. All you need to do is on the server side, add insecure as an option into /etc/exports like this:

/home/Monster *(rw,sync,no_subtree_check,insecure)

Then in Finder, you can use the familiar  ⌘K and give

nfs://192.168.0.11/home/Monster

Then, your network share should be mounted and you should have access to it. That said, you now are subject to POSIX file permissions.

Hope this helps!