Help needed with NFS shares in Dolphin

Help
1

Recently I discovered that my way of manually mounting NFS shares using /etc/fstab is not the right way to use Dolphin, according to this post:

However, when I try to access the shares from the Dolphin address bar using nfs://servername/sharename it merely triggers an error:

Could not mount device. The reported error was: followed by the path of the share.

I can manually mount the share (using sudo) fine though.

I have tested this with several distros running Plasma 5.x (Neon, Debian, Manjaro, Fedora) with varying (latest) versions of Dolphin. In Plasma 6.x the support for NFS even seems completely missing, but that seems like a different issue.

I used this in my /etc/exports file on the NFS kernel server:

/var/nfs/share 192.168.0.0/24(rw,async,no_subtree_check,no_root_squash)

I would greatly appreciate if anyone could help me using Dolphin as intended.

1 Like
2

Well nfs:// was removed in KDE Gears 6.
It might reappear, but not soon.

I didn’t remember this happened and was not involved.

3

Does this mean that Dolphin should not expose the nfs:// functionality anymore, so the fact that it does is to be treated like a bug?

4

It was removed for lack of resources to port it to new API.
It may become available especially if they is user demand.

5

Sorry, that’s not what I meant. A feature being been dropped is not a bug, of course, but Dolphin trying to expose a feature that is no longer there should be treated as such, I guess?

6

Yeah as I mentioned I had noticed the nfs:// support being missing / removed in Plasma 6.x (Dolphin 24.02.1).

But does that leave any way at all for Dolphin to use NFS shares without blocking and stalling the entire system?

7

Do you actually have problems with this setup? From my experience the issues are not as dramatic. There can be occasional hiccups but not to the point of becoming a regular annoyance or making the system unusable (it’s just the Dolphin UI that hangs).

An alternative to system-level mounts could be using GNOME GVfs. It is possible to use Gigolo as a GUI front-end to manage GVfs mounts without having to install a file manager such as Nautilus or Thunar. Unfortunately there is no native integration of GVfs in Plasma, but maybe with an appropriate configuration of shortcuts one could get a working setup.

Possibly the abstraction provided by GVfs can make things a bit more asynchronous when Dolphin accesses the filesystem, but I am not 100% sure of that. It’s been a while since I tried to use GVfs mounts in KDE.

8

Yes, when copying large files to or from NFS shares defined in /etc/fstab, Dolphin stops responding until the operation is complete. Also, the UI turns grey after some time, indicating it is not responding to events. Especially with large files, this is pretty annoying imo.

I will look into GVfs; thank you for the suggestion!

9

That sounds like it could be your system syncing.
Try adding sync to your mount options.
(or do the systemd mount we discussed in DM:s xD)

1 Like
10

Actually, changing async to sync in my NFS share settings DID solve the freezing of Dolphin. Thank you!

My setup is now back to how it always has been (except for the sync shares). I did not get any other response to my question about the proper way to use Dolphin. So for now I’ll leave it at that and move on :).

Thanks again for your help!

Greetings, Fonkle.