RISC OS / Mac shared drive

@Steve

if you need to access the share with a specific UID and GID, have you tried using Sunfish as the RISC OS client instead of Omni?
With that, you can set the two IDs the first time you connect to a share, to whatever values that share expects.

That is exactly what I want but unfortunately:
 

The Sunfish version is 2.05 (22 May 2010) It runs and puts an icon on the icon bar.
Click on icon bar opens a window titled “NFS Servers”.
Menu on window >Search for host… crashes
Menu on window, then move pointer off window also crashes.
Dump, excdump is produced with a consistent address : 5E238

I believe it is only the front end which is causing the problem but I have not
studied it enough to know how to use Sunfish without the frontend.

I believe it is only the front end which is causing the problem but I have not studied it enough to know how to use Sunfish without the frontend.

I don’t really have the time to dig into this now, but with the Sunfish module loaded (*Help Sunfish), create a textfile along these lines:

Protocol: NFS3
Server: 192.168.0.7
Export: /Users/riscman
uid: 501
gid: 501
Transport: TCP
ShowHidden: 0

Obviously change the Server and Export entries to suit your specific mount points; also edit the UID and GID as required. Save this to disc, then set the type to ‘Sunfish’ – it should now behave as an image filing system, where double-clicking will open the mount. No front-end required.

To edit the file further, change the filetype back to ‘Text’, so that it doesn’t behave as an ImageFS any more.

There are a load of other options that you can add – I’ve not read back up the thread to see what your requirements are.

If you can get this to work, hand-editing the mount into the front-end isn’t too hard: that way, you can have an icon on the iconbar, so long as you don’t try to click Menu over it!

I can probably spend a bit longer on this after the new year – for now it’s only going to be snatches of time here and there, I’m afraid.

Now , The question is Which NAS? home brewed with spare Raspberry Pi or commercial box like Synology DS118.

I switched from a large, insecure (Linux-based, but software updates dried up some time ago), power-hungry (and with a proprietary PSU as I found out when it broke) and not-exactly-silent Netgear 4 drive NAS (3.5" WD Red when those were still reliable) to a Pi 4 (2 GiB variant) and a single USB3 SSD drive. OpenMediaVault as software, works flawlessly. Fast, silent, low power consumption, and OMV is much much better than the Netgear stuff.

@Steve thanks I now have Sunfish working with a mount file and have read write access to files created on the mac. I need to tidy up a bit but believe this is the solution I have been lookking for.

Same hardware here, but I use vanilla Raspbian Samba and NFS servers with my own multi level and distributed backup systems.

I have used OpenMediaVault successfully for some years now, on a RasPi3B+ with three 2.5" 1TB rotary drives. Be careful of power considerations. Other than that, it’s packaged, so it makes installation easy; and it does all its own updating – mine is set up to email me whenever an update has been downloaded, and merely waits for me to authorise installation. Only very rarely does it require a reboot after an update.

SMB1 is not enabled by default, so you’d need to read the instructions to find out how to enable it. I didn’t find it too difficult.

I now have Sunfish working with a mount file and have read write access to files created on the mac.

That’s good – I’m glad it helped!

I need to tidy up a bit

Now you’ve got this far, we just need to get the mount(s) on to the iconbar. There are a couple of other files to edit for that: I’ll need to be in front of a RISC OS box to be more specific, unfortunately, but will see what I can do tomorrow…

To get from an ImageFS mount to an icon on the iconbar, there’s a couple more things to do. If it doesn’t already exist, create yourself a Choices:Sunfish folder, then inside that a folder called mountsave. Into mountsave, save the ImageFS file that you created for your mount. The name of the file needs to be the path to the mount, so for the example above, it would be 192?168?0?7/Users/riscman – note that the dots become question marks. It might be safest to set the type to Text first, copy or move it, then restore the Sunfish type when it’s in place – otherwise, the Filer might try to copy the entire mount contents…

You can now give the mount a friendly name to appear under it on the iconbar. To do this, create an aliases file in the Sunfish choices folder, containing

Name#192.168.0.7#/Users/riscman

The first bit (“Name”) is the name that you want to appear, then the path to the mount, hash separated. I don’t know if it’s essential, but make sure there’s a newline at the end. You can add more aliases, each on their own line.

Finally, you need to tell Sunfish Filer about the mount. You need one more file in the choices folder, called savemounts. This should contain blocks of four lines, which are in a machine-friendly format, like this:

Name

1
3

The first line is the mount name (or alias) that we have above (“Name”, here), the second is blank. I’m not 100% sure what the third and fourth are; I think they’re UDP/TCP and NFS version, but I’d need to read the source code to check. Repeat these blocks of four lines for each mount that you want on the iconbar. This file is machine, not human, readable. Include no extra spaces, no extra blank lines – it’s just blocks of four lines, one after the other.

With all of these saved, running Sunfish should put your mounts on the iconbar. Fingers crossed!

@Steve thanks I now have Sunfish working with a mount file and have read write access to files created on the mac. I need to tidy up a bit but believe this is the solution I have been lookking for.

I’m glad you have it working, but I told you how to do this almost two weeks ago…

Steve, is not simpler just to give a descriptive name to the sunfish file and use AddTinyDir?

Using sunfish should be temporary. It’s not maintained, it crashes randomly (depends on the load), and it is
duplicating some functionality already in the system. Why don’t take a look at the bug reports and fix it?
It’s a problem with the permissions of the mount, it can’t be so hard. And no, ROOL, I’m not paying 50 pounds to fix it myself, thanks. All this thread is just caused by “1” bug. I’m not going to be around, as I said before I need a system with correct UTF-8 support. I’m a stubborn bloke, so I had to convince myself that right now using UTF-8 in risc os is not feasible, I was just wasting time I don’t have. It’s a shame, there are things in riscos that are really unique and attractive, although some people seems to not value what makes riscos special and think that the future is to convert it into another unix clone. Take this as a friendly advice from an outsider: get your priorities right and make the development environment accessible to new people.

Bye to all, and happy new year!

Steve, is not simpler just to give a descriptive name to the sunfish file and use AddTinyDir?

Personally, no, I don’t think it is. YMMV.

Using sunfish should be temporary. It’s not maintained, it crashes randomly (depends on the load)

Um. All of my storage is on NFS, and I use Sunfish daily. It’s Open Source, and the Filer has been rebuilt at least once for hardware compatibility.

I can’t say I’ve noticed the instability. As I say, I use it daily for all of my storage, and the Filer seems rock solid. The Desktop Filer has serious issues, but I’m not sure that I’d agree with “crashes randomly” or “depends on the load”. From what I can see, it crashes when you interact with the menus in certain ways – which suggests that it would be worth looking at what values the code is passing to Wimp_CreateMenu. There’s certainly a very similar set of symptoms arising from the mixing up of NULL and -1 as parameters to that SWI, which came in with one of the Wimp updates a few years back.

The key thing is that it isn’t necessary to interact with the Desktop Filer in a way that involves menus, except to configure the finer aspects of new mounts. Searching for mounts, and connecting to them on their default values, works fine.

Why don’t take a look at the bug reports and fix it?

I have looked at fixing Sunfish, and from memory hit a problem with the build environment that it needed: it’s a mix of a C Filer module and a C++ Desktop Filer front end, and used two different versions of GCC. IIRC, this looked as if it would be fun to disentangle, although it’s still on my to-do list. There was also a missing library, though I think Dave H solved that one.

As I said above, building the Filer in isolation from source seems fine. It’s the Desktop Filer that’s the problem bit (and also the bit where the bugs are).

It’s a problem with the permissions of the mount, it can’t be so hard.

If someone wishes to fix this in Omni’s NFS client, along with the option to set custom UID and GID values, that would be great. However, there’s also the issue of hiding hidden files, and probably other things, too.

Bye to all, and happy new year!

Happy New Year to you, too…

I’ve had problems copying big amount of data from a nfs server several times, recently and in the past (almost 10 years ago). I only use ImageFS, not the front-end for the reasons you noticed. Only when moving big amount of data, hundreds of Gb. And sometimes it crashes, sometimes not, so randomly. If you don’t have problems, just forget about it. Omni is maintained by ROOL, it’s shipped with the rpi img, it should be fixed. Just my opinion.

If the last ellipsis is for the capitalization of “New Year”, I’m sorry, I’m used to old-school ASCII (now UTF-8) mailing lists, where one doesn’t waste time even on that. For me is extravagant having to use tags to this type
of exchanges. But I read here Queen’s English, so my bad for not adapting myself to the environment.

Only the second paragraph was directed to you. The rest is for the people maintaining riscos. I have the impression
that you thought I was asking directly to you to fix the bugs, no way! As I said, just a friendly advice
to the people maintaining the code.

If the last ellipsis is for the capitalization of “New Year”

“New Year” should be capitalised, because it is referring to a specific holiday, which means it is a proper noun (rather than those improper ones lurking behind the bike sheds ☺).

In British English, ellipses are used to denote two things:

• Something has been omitted (in quotations)
• A sentence that has been left unfinished

It’s the latter case here, and unlike a dash that means the sentence has been abruptly stopped, the three dots imply that the ‘speaker’ has trailed off into silence, a sort of “to be continued”, if you will…

There was also a missing library, though I think Dave H solved that one.

I emailed Alex Waugh, who pointed me at the library he used. But at the time I was working on WireSalmon, not Sunfish/Moonfish, and in the end I decided to write a new front end for Wiresalmon using C and the Toolbox. That’s a rather easier project than for Sunfish/Moonfish.

I did have a look at Sunfish/Moonfish a few years back. I can’t remember whether I got the modules to build (probably not), but I managed to overcome the use of a scripting language to create one of the compilable source files. The trouble is that I’ve forgotten what I did. I blame my advanced years, and trying to stuff my head with so much stuff. I do remember finding the source of a null pointer reference.

But if anyone would like to have a cooperative go at bringing these extremely useful apps up to date, please count me in and I’ll do what I can.

With all of these saved, running Sunfish should put your mounts on the iconbar. Fingers crossed!

The fingers crossed was not a strong enough magic.
To the best of my knowledge I followed the instructions but nothing appears on the icon bar. If I double click the mount file in Choices:Sunfish it opens correctly.

Here is what my choices directory contains:-

The fingers crossed was not a strong enough magic.

The savemounts file should be up one level, alongside aliases and mountsave. I was able to generate these Choices directly from the Sunfish front end on the RPi4 using a low vector custom ROM build. There was still a magic deficit in that only one of the two mounts appeared on the icon bar. What actually on the icon bar is the (very, very) crashy Sunfish front end with a changed icon.

running Sunfish should put your mounts on the iconbar

(mis)understood this to mean just the Sunfish module.
Running the !Sunfish app (including the !Runfile) does allow me to access the drive,
but quitting gives the front-end error as reported earlier.

The savemounts file should be up one level, alongside aliases and mountsave.

Thanks – done that, it’s beginning to come together:-)
501Shared now appears on the icon bar and will open a filer window if clicked which behaves normally.

All entries on the iconbar menu work except for “Dismount” which causes a crash with address 5E338.

All entries on the iconbar menu work except for “Dismount” which causes a crash with address 5E338.

I see that too.

I’m glad you have it working, but I told you how to do this almost two weeks ago…

Sorry I did not react to this advice. With hindsight it may have been a better choice than the OmniClient route.
Two weeks ago I knew very little about NFS found the idea daunting.

Anyways, I’ m being dragged away from the ‘puters and told to dress for a New Year’s Eve Party or is that party?

Until next year then, good wishes and thanks to everybody who has contributed to this thread.

On New Year’s Eve it appeared that Sunfish had won the NFS battle with Omni.
With a suitable Sunfish mount it was possible to edit files in RISC OS that were created on the Mac.
Up to this point I still had an Omni NFS mount as well as a Sunfish one.
It seemed the Omni mount was redundant so I dismounted it.
Nothing bad happened. the Sunfish mount continued to work.
However, I found that it was not possible to use TaskWiindow to manage NFS files.
Here is output from a TaskWindow with Sunfish mount active but no Omni mount. (the ls command is from CoreUtils)

*show *nfsfiler*
NFSFiler$Running : Yes
*NFS
*ls -hlpn
ls: cannot open directory '.': No such file or directory
*
*| at this point I mounted an NFS share from OmniClient
*| then repeated the ls command
*ls -hlpn
total 37K
-rwx------ 1 1 1 8.6K   2 10:40 excdump
---------- 1 1 1  28K  29  2023 petcalurl.jpg
*  

Typical RISC OS , One app to rule them all it isn’t. I need to run both apps to get what I want.

OK, so Sunfish does not translate the . and / separators as required here but a TaskWindow does work with RISC OS commands and ls works with the Linux separator. iTrans is the Sunfish mount file.

*dir SCSI::SSD120.$.Internet.NFS.iTrans
*ls -l
ls: cannot open directory '.': Not a directory

*ls /
'!Boot'     Desktop      Internet   Printing    Work       _ROOL
 Boot       Diversions   Library    Progm       _Boot120   _Stored
 Compress   Info         Office     Utilities   _ROD704    __BU

*ls -l /!Boot
total 110
-r-xr-xr-x 1 riscos 1   561  26 05:29 '!Boot'
-r-xr-xr-x 1 riscos 1   126  26 05:29 '!Help'
-rwx------ 1 riscos 1   459  16 03:24 '!Run'
...

*ex
Dir. SCSI::SSD120.$.Internet.NFS.iTrans Option 00 (Off)
CSD  SCSI::SSD120.$.Internet.NFS.iTrans
Lib. SCSI:"Unset"
URD  SCSI:"Unset"
...
Mounts              WR/WR   Text      09:45:54 07-May-2022  452  bytes
rr2/png             WR/WR   PNG       10:07:26 17-May-2022  155 kbytes
PySSL/tx            WR/WR   Text      09:58:00 04-Apr-2022  385  bytes
512MB/zi            DWR/WR  Directory 11:26:26 31-Aug-2019  512 Mbytes
sea15/tx            WR/WR   Text      18:11:02 29-Jul-2022   74  bytes
pi/img/zip          DWR/R   Directory 18:21:22 29-Apr-2023   35 Mbytes
...

I’m currently using a Synology DS220j. It just works. Lanman98 connects reliably, every time, …

I’m not a MAC user, so apologies for adding this comment to a thread about connecting to MACs.

LanMan98 is available on Pling Store for free. I just downloaded LanMan98 and connected to my Synology DS216DE NAS. Setting up was no more difficult than adding a shared drive in (say) Windows 7. Backed up my RISC OS RPi2 SD card contents to a folder on the Synology NAS without problem. Thanks to the “RISC OS Devs” for making LanMan98 free (it used to cost as much as a Raspberry Pi !).

Ralph

@David – sorry I did not put it very clearly. It is not a problem with “ls” but with Sunfish.
It does not fully enable NFS in the same way Omni does.
Your examples are with SCSI filing. If you change filing system to NFS it fails with no current mount point..

*SCSI                                                 
*cat                                                  
Dir. SCSI::SSD.$ Option 02 (Run)                      
!Boot        D/      AcornC/C++   D/WR    Apps
Documents    D/WR    excdump      WR/     Images      
...
                                                      
*NFS                                                  
*cat                                                  
No current mount point                                
*        

Now mount any NFS directory via Omni and:

NFS
*cat
Dir. NFS::macshare.$ Option 00 (Off) 
CSD  NFS::macshare.$
Lib. NFS:"Unset"
URD  NFS:"Unset"
tw3       R/r       imagez        DR/R   
excdump   WR/       sundocs/txt    R/
*

I’m not a MAC user, so apologies for adding this comment to a thread about connecting to MACs.

No need to apologise it’s pretty close to topic and the thread is mostly about connecting via NFS.
I suspect the NFS Mac connect experience would would be the same with Windows or Linux

LanMan98 is available on Pling Store for free. I just downloaded LanMan98 and connected to my Synology DS216DE NAS.

Nothing against LanMan98 but I think you can get a similar result with OmniClient which comes as part of RISC OS..

Omni NFS != Sunfish NFS.

Sunfish paths are e.g. SunFish::servername/Users/homedir.$

You can set an alias for the mount in Sunfish so the path above becomes,

SunFish::alias.$

Some things can’t handle the forward slashes in the mount name. e.g ‘ls’.

Omni NFS paths are NFS::mountname.$

The Mac creates a Finder app customisation file .DS_Store for every directory it opens.
They are just clutter in the RISC OS environment and are a bit annoying as they are usually at the top .
You can delete any existing .DS_Stores in the Shared directory.
The following command stops them from being created.

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool true

Omni NFS != Sunfish NFS.

Which unfortunately means I need to use both.
A mount in Sunfish(user=501) has the same permissions as 501 on the server including create and delete.
A read only (user=nobody) mount in Omni enables the use of network management commands in a TaskWindow.

Everything is good except Omni and Sunfish have put icons on the icon bar. I don’t need the Omni one.