[sinebubble]

I'm considering placing my iTunes library on Sun box and sharing out the filesystem so that I can access it over nfs from various systems. Has anyone else done this? Any problems with using UFS?

[utidjian]

You may have problems with NFS file locking. Apple introduced NFS file locking in Panther, they didn't use it before so it wasn't a problem. Unfortunately they used an incompatible NFSLOCK cookie size. This problem seems to affect the iApps and Safari, possibly others. What happens is it tries to lock the file with the incorrectly sized cookie and can't. The app then locks up. Only way to clear it is to reboot.

Fortunately there is a workaround: Append 'NFSLOCKS=-NO-' (without the quotes) to your /etc/hostconfig file on the Mac client. This sets it to the pre-Panther style of NFS and bypasses the problem.

Panther NFS file locking only works properly with FreeBSD and Mac OS X as the NFS file server.

Other than the file locking you should not have any problem sharing iTunes folders via NFS. I do the same thing and I have no problems.

[sinebubble]

Good to know, utidjian.

I moved my iTunes folder and mounted my Solaris share and was able to successfully run iTunes on that mount. The testing begins!

[Stefan]

I'm using 10.2.8 with a NFS shared iTunes on a Linux box. One of the problems I was confronted with is that iTunes will be looking for ever for a song that should be available over NFS if the Linux box is not connected. There is no way to stop that process once you clicked a song afaik.
With SMB it just gives you a message that the file you are looking for is not available.

[utidjian]

Originally posted by Stefan:
I'm using 10.2.8 with a NFS shared iTunes on a Linux box. One of the problems I was confronted with is that iTunes will be looking for ever for a song that should be available over NFS if the Linux box is not connected. There is no way to stop that process once you clicked a song afaik.
With SMB it just gives you a message that the file you are looking for is not available.

I don't have that problem because I mount /home/userid via NFS. If there is no connection to the NFS server then iTunes doesn't know about any songs that were available via NFS so won't go looking for them. This is because the whole "iTunes environment" (less the program itself) is mounted via NFS. Seems to work OK when I am disconnected from the NFS server because then I use the regular /Users/userid and my "iTunes environment" is now local. Mac OS X seems to handle it pretty well. Of course the downside might be that $HOMEs are not in sync but that is easy enough to sync when connected.

[sinebubble]

Originally posted by Stefan:
I'm using 10.2.8 with a NFS shared iTunes on a Linux box. One of the problems I was confronted with is that iTunes will be looking for ever for a song that should be available over NFS if the Linux box is not connected. There is no way to stop that process once you clicked a song afaik.
With SMB it just gives you a message that the file you are looking for is not available.

Stefan, I'm mounting at /Users/<iud>/Music/iTunes, so the media *and* the library files are stored remotely. If I fire up iTunes w/o the mount, it will create a new library or use whatever is stored locally. Of course, the trick with my way is that it could be problematic if I use iTunes from two different systems as they will both be accessing the library files at the same time. With your way of mounting just the media, you avoid using the same library files on two different systems...

My Netra's firmware and physical size limits me to two internal 120GB disks, so I may build a Linux system for the media storage. Which filesystem have you been using? Any issues?