NFS Exports confusion

Question

I am trying to export a share using NFS in Workgroup Manager. I have what I think should work but the client behaves as if there is nothing being exported.
I wanted to check /etc/exports to make sure WGM had done things sanely but I find that it doesn't exist! Apple's documentation and man pages make reference to this file. I'm comfortable creating it 'by hand' but I'd like to know what OS X did with the stuff I set up in WGM first!
thanks,
sean

Answer 1

"showmount" is a generic NFS tool. It's not tied to NetInfo at all. Pretty much the only relation of NetInfo to the NFS server is the aforementioned behavior of the NFS server getting exports from NetInfo if the /etc/exports file didn't exist.
In general, when debugging NFS issues you'll always want to check /var/log/system.log.
Other useful tools include:
showmount -e
rpcinfo -p
And of course, wireshark when you need to dissect the packets on the wire.
Note that showmount and rpcinfo can be run from the NFS client too, you just
need to include the server's name or IP address as an extra argument.
New in 10.5 are some helpful sub-commands included as part of the "nfsd" command:
nfsd -v status
nfsd checkexports
All of these tools have man pages that you can dig into if you need to.
HTH
--macko