NFS_mount_popup

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  • Launchpad entry: none yet

  • Packages affected: nfs-common, ...?

Summary

While a newly installed Ubuntu desktop is able to for example do

mount 10.1.2.3:/home /home -t nfs -o rw,defaults,nfsvers=3

it will perform very slow and even fail (timeout) if the nfs-common package is not installed. This spec suggests to wrap mount ...-t nfs... to send a notification to dbus(?) so that a popup can be present to the user to install nfs-common in case this is not already done.

Rationale

Use cases

  • Bring laptop to work and mount the NFS servers there
  • Setup an NFS network at home

Scope

Increase usability for laptop users and people unexperienced with NFS

Design

I suggest that the mount command is wrapped to aviod affecting upstream too much since dbus is a new and possibly a slightly Ubuntu specific concept. The gnome-mount package project https://features.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/gnome-mount would be ideal. The wrapper should throw dbus events when the user or the automounter mounts a new filesystem. The user should be able to make a setting to accept or ignore these suggestions automtically. The dbus event should be catched by a deamon responsible for handling the (lightbulb?) popup and trigger the package installer if the user so chooses.

Implementation

The DBUS event thrower could be implemented in gnome-mount.

The lightbulb-daemon daemon is either already existing for similar purposes or written similarily to the Ubuntu update checker.

Code

Data preservation and migration

When this wrapper is installed the original mount could be renamed to mount-debian or similar and a script installs as /bin/mount doing the correct things to generate the dbus events. This way all functionality is still preserved and the migration is transparent. There is probably a better way of doing this but we need to catch both /etc/fstab mounts, automounts and terminal mounts.

Unresolved issues

BoF agenda and discussion


CategorySpec CategoryLaptop

NFS_mount_popup (last edited 2008-08-06 16:21:03 by localhost)