FreeNAS NFS Share to raspberry pi (raspbmc)

uncle_rufus · 10 Sep 2013 at 10:01

Hey all,

Couldn't decide if this was better in the Linux subforum or this one, so if I picked wrong and a mod wants to move it then please feel free to do so

I've setup a test install of the latest FreeNAS on my microserver, and setup CIFS + NFS shares, with the intention of trying out serving up some content to my raspberry pi (running raspbmc). The CIFS share is fine, I can browse to it from my Windows machines and add it as a source from XBMC, but the NFS share just won't appear in XBMC for some reason.

I've put in 192.168.1.0/24 as "Authorised Networks" in the FreeNAS settings, and the IP of the pi as an "Authorised Host" but it just fails to acknowledge the share's existence. A few other points of note:

- My other (old, soon to be replaced) server, running Ubuntu 11.10 server edition

rolleyes: too lazy to update) is sharing media over CIFS and NFS also, which the pi has no trouble in picking up.

- If I SSH into my other server, or use Linux Mint on my main PC I appear to be able to see the NFS share from the microserver just fine (it won't let me mount it on either because only the pi is an authorised host, but I at least get a message suggesting it found the share and would mount it if it was authorised)

Any ideas where I should start to try and track this down?

uncle_rufus · 10 Sep 2013 at 15:53

I think I did that already and it didn't make a difference... but I will take a look when I get home and see

uncle_rufus · 10 Sep 2013 at 16:21

I'll take a look - though I notice the Pi *can* see the freenas server, but only via its CIFS share, not the NFS share (both are sharing the same folder)

Edit: Okay so firstly "Allow non root mount" is definitely checked in FreeNAS... so next step is to try the sources.xml file, I assume this is nestled within the /home/pi/.xbmc folder on the pi somewhere... It's strange that raspbmc can see my NFS share from Ubuntu 11.10 okay but not the one from FreeNAS, I'd be curious to understand what exactly the difference is between them

uncle_rufus · 10 Sep 2013 at 23:14

Cheers for that, I did find the sources.xml file in the end but as it turns out manually adding the NFS share to XBMC also works... (i.e. instead of clicking "Browse" then "NFS" you actually just input "nfs://192.168.1.XX/path/to/share/" into the add source dialog directly). It's funny because on my Ubuntu server's NFS shares XBMC detects them automatically and I can just browse to them - I wonder what the difference is?

It's interesting that you find the CIFS performance to be okay, for me NFS is better but even then I'm still struggling to track down some errors... Sometimes an episode or movie will play completely perfectly, and other times I'll get freezing issues (I can remedy this by doing a quick rewind then fast forward, but its annoying). This is to an original 256Mb pi with the server wired and the pi connected via a 200Mbps set of powerline adapters, whether I use CIFS or NFS... I'm unsure if it's the pi struggling to play it back, the network itself or the powerline adapters, or maybe the server is struggling to send the data quick enough (seems unlikely), any thoughts?

uncle_rufus · 11 Sep 2013 at 11:58

Frozennova said:
Mines a model B so 512mb ram over Gigabit lan, is it overclocked at all? I've had no trouble with CIFs at all even with 20-30GB MKVs

I can check later if it's overclocked, from memory I think raspbmc might apply some basic overclock as standard but it has a menu option to switch between overclocking settings (i.e. fast, super fast etc)...

The two problems I have with it are the freezing issue I described, and the fact that every once in a while I turn it on and it seems to have failed to initialise the network interface (can't ssh in, can't use my android app over wi-fi to control it, using a usb keyboard to exit to command line reveals that as far as the pi is concerned eth0 doesn't exist). In the latter case the only solution seems to be to re-image the SD card and let raspbmc install itself again (then restore .xbmc from a backup).

It's annoying because it works perfectly other than those issues, and the freezing issue in particular is tricky because it doesn't happen in a very predictable way, making it quite hard to test if any changes I make have made a difference... (That and I can't be 100% sure it's even the Pi... could my powerline adapters be to blame? Or my router? Surely not the fileserver itself?)

uncle_rufus · 11 Sep 2013 at 13:44

Would I see better performance if I had a switch? (read: could the lack of a switch cause the freezing?)

uncle_rufus · 13 Sep 2013 at 10:33

Well... it didn't help, I tried changing the overclock settings on raspbmc from "Normal" to "Fast" (there is a level above that, but one step at a time!), using the NFS share from my microserver to play back an SD 720p file.

About 2 or 3 minutes into playing it back, freezes... I do a quick rewind/fast-foward to get it going again... another minute or so it freezes again... this time after getting it going it plays the whole episode through to the end without any further problems...

I feel like it's got to be something to do with buffering maybe? Like the 2 or 3 minutes at the start was how long it took to fill up the memory it was allocated to buffer into? And then something weird happened? I'm not sure...

uncle_rufus · 13 Sep 2013 at 13:10

Cheers to you both, I'll look into these and see if it helps...

Is setting the buffer size to ~150Mb (come on maths, don't let me down

) okay to do on the 256Mb model of the Pi?

uncle_rufus · 13 Sep 2013 at 15:11

Frozennova said:
Think so, I can't remember where I got that from but I have it set in my advanced settings file

Good stuff

- I'll give it a go this evening and post back here with my findings

uncle_rufus · 13 Sep 2013 at 15:53

Frozennova said:
I think it was actually the XBMC wiki and its recommended for use on the Pi.

Another thing to try although a minor PITA would be trying OpenElec

Yep, it's on my list of things to try for sure - but rather than scrap and re-install right now while it's usable I figured it was probably only a matter of time until the network interface craps out again and I'm forced to re-install anyway so I could try openELEC then... a week later it's still running fine :rolleyes:

I'd also like to try installing to NFS (root on NFS), I know raspbmc has that as an option in the installer but I assume it's do-able with other distros as well

uncle_rufus · 13 Sep 2013 at 20:07

Update: So I'm giving advancedsettings.xml a bash right now... and I don't want to tempt fate but I'm playing the same file which froze last night and it hasn't frozen at the beginning...

I didn't go with the ~150Mb mentioned above though, because I did a little reading on the wiki and it sounds as though XBMC will use around 3x whatever is set, and ~450Mb of memory usage on a 256Mb device didn't sound good to me

A few people seemed to have luck setting it to 10Mb (30Mb actual usage), and others recommend setting it to 0 (which uses the disk as a cache instead of the RAM). I'm going to give it a go with 10Mb and see how it handles things.

Cheers again for the tip