Monday 1 November 2010

NFS on MacOS is broken!

I've been looking into iPhone development lately as I wanted to get an idea about what is involved. This means I've been force to use my Mac Mini for development. I'm not really a Mac user as I mostly use Linux (KDE). At first I wanted to use eclipse like I do for everything else. Currently this does not seem possible so I've been forced to use xcode.

I'll probably talk more about xcode in a later blog entry, but for now I'd like to rant about how bad NFS support in Mac applications are. I have NFS shared directories so that my server contains all user details. This has lots of benefits like been able to move between my different machines, but the main advantage is that they data is backup centrally from the server.

It seems many mac applications just don't work with NFS. I've never had a problem in Linux, all applications work with NFS that I've tried. I even play WOW from a NFS directory via crossover games with no problems!

So here is a list of apps I've discovered have problems:
  • iPhone simulator (Can't install developed apps)
  • xcode (Can't save files)
  • Installers (One of my macs can't install stuff unless they are done from local dir).
If anyone knows how to get round these problems I'd love to here it.