[Vm-dev] VM building on Pi, OpenGL libraries and other fun things

[tim Rowledge]

> On 12-08-2017, at 7:27 AM, Ben Coman <btc at openInWorld.com> wrote:
> 
> If you can't solve the problem, change the problem (again!)
> nfs bad, afpfs bad, 
> may as well double down and go for the trifecta, 
> maybe try smb?

Yeah, much though I grew to hate trying to connect via smb in the early Pi days, it seems it’s the least bad option right now. 

So, children, what have we learned today (well over the last week of mind melting annoyance and stupid software idiosyncracies)

NFS is old and getting annoying. Eliot pointed out that you might choose to make users with suitably matching uid/gid values so that logging into nfs on the Mac agrees politely and thus should work. Apparently there is also a way to change uid and so on but I’m really not too interested in delving into arcane unix stuff that far. This is supposed to be a tool, not a lifelong occupation. 

AFPfs works quite nicely from a commandline mount but simply doesn’t seem to want to work within fstab-world. Also, the package available for Pi seems to be missing a rather important script file for some reason. And it does seem to get lost in recursions of some sort, ones that is spends a lot of time warning about and occasionally locking up processes as a result. Also seems to have become a bit bit-rotted and the author has not been contactable thus far. There are a *lot* of web hits for problems.

CIFS/SMB is annoying. Just because it is. It does however appear to function tolerably after far more digging than I ever thought I’d be willing to spend time on. It does at least allow one to connect under the auspices of a particular user and uid/gid set, thus sidestepping the NFS issue that prompted me to go on this ridiculous journey. Getting it to work in fstab-land was even more exciting than you’d imagine.

Eventually and hopefully finally, it looks like I have a working system with this setup -
make a directory to mount the filesystem to
`mkdir /home/pi/aPlace`
ensure it has full permissions (not entirely sure if really required)
`chmod ugo+rwx aPlace`
find out the uid on the pi (seems to be 1000 normally)
`id`

add this to /etc/fstab
"//192.168.1.65/tim /home/pi/DizietFS cifs username=myUsernameOnOtherMachine,password=myPasswordOnOtherMachine,uid=piUID,gid=pi,iocharset=utf8,nounix,sec=ntlmssp,x-systemd.automount 0 0"
The nounix & sec= stuff seems to be crucial to connecting properly when booting. The systemd thing is required on a machine using systemd, like any recent Pi.

With this lot I can actually reboot, have the Mac FS connected and using the ‘right’ uid/gid, and even compile a vm! Woot!

Another thing we’ve learned is that despite fstab having a supposedly specified syntax, almost no file system stuff appears to stick to it. This leads me back to a conclusion I first reached many years ago - 

We (collectively, software developers) suck. Instead of making things more usable and useful we are making people spend large portions of their lives dig through trash to try to correct idiotic mistakes we dump on them.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
To iterate is human; to recurse, divine.