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SecuritySpy with NFS

edited December 2014 in SecuritySpy
Has anyone had luck getting the web interface to display recorded movie/image capture files when SecuritySpy is writing to an NFS mounted volume?
I automounted a NFS share on my NAS as /mnt/cameras on my Mac. SecuritySpy has no problems writing files to it and the built-in browser lets me see everything. When I use the web UI or an app like Remote Patrol (which presumably uses the web API too), I get a message saying "No files found for the specified search parameters".

However if I export the same volume via netatalk/AFP and mount it on the Mac, I can view the capture files via web UI and Remote Patrol, things work fine. Even if I write captured files to a USB-connected external hard disk things work fine, so it's only NFS volumes with issues.

The NAS is a simple OpenSolaris system exporting a ZFS dataset via NFS v3 (and AFP) sitting on the same LAN segment and subnet. From the Mac:

bash-3.2# nfsstat -m
/mnt/cameras from closetserver.local:/data0/cameras
-- Original mount options:
General mount flags: 0x500018 nodev,nosuid,automounted,nobrowse
NFS parameters: tcp,soft,rdirplus
File system locations:
/data0/cameras @ closetserver.local (192.168.130.12)

I'm wondering if it's some sort issue of file attributes that NFS isn't presenting? I noticed when I browse locally captured files on the startup disk vs NFS stored files in Finder, do a 'Get Info' (Inspector), the local files show under "More Info" things like Dimensions, codec, file type. When I inspect files on NFS this section is completely blank. Is there some logic in the webserver that looks at this and says "oh I got no file information, I'm skipping it?"

When I snoop on the NAS during "View as List" from the web UI's captured file menu, I see a bunch of "NFS C GETATTR3" packets being returned to the Mac so it's clearly accessing NFS but not returning anything to list on the web page. :(

Comments

  • Hi bwann,

    Interesting, it appears that something is breaking down with the communication of the file metadata (file size, creation date, modification date etc.) between the NAS and Mac OS. This must be why there is nothing in the "Get Info" window in the Finder, and why SecuritySpy isn't displaying the files via the web interface.

    It sounds like something may be going wrong with the AFP connection. AFP is always going to work better on Mac than other file system protocols like SMB or NFS. If you "Get Info" on the mounted drive in the Finder, you should see under the "Server" information what the connection is - does it start with afp://?

    Are you able to disable all protocols on the NAS apart from AFP? This will force the Mac to use AFP, which may resolve the problem.
  • Yeah, to be clear I'm explicitly configuring the mount from the Mac with one protocol at a time. Right now I'm using AFP with an afp:// mount and everything is working fine, Get Info returns all the correct metadata info about the video files, web UI works and all.

    It was when I was originally using an NFS mount (with nfs://) that's when I noticed the missing metadata and missing search results. I guess the story here is not to use NFS.
  • I did some more digging after figuring out what the metadata is called ("extended attributes"). Looks like AFP and SMB support them, but the NFS standard does not. There's a IETF draft in hopes of adding support for extended attributes to NFSv4 but it's only a draft. So AFP and SMB really are the only workable options here.
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