Autodetection of network shares

[kallisti5]

Currently, if you mount an NFS device, it goes into the BVolumeRoster with a "IsShared" == true setting. This results in the share showing up in the tracker menu with the other devices.

It would be an interesting feature to automatically detect shared volumes on the network and auto load them into BVolumeRoster (unmounted)

​https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-configuration_networking#Apple_Bonjour ​https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-configuration_networking#Avahi

The not well known mount_nfs command results in not many users realizing we support NFS shares.

[pulkomandy]

I never heard of zeroconf being used with NFS. The protocols allow it, but if no shares are advertised this way, the list will never get any entries.

Or, do you know of another way to discover available NFS shares? Hint: port-scanning random IP addresses is not the way to go.

However, Tracker integration or some UI to mount network drives (it could be in mount preferences, or network prefs, or something yet separate), would be nice. Not sure we can do away with asking the user for the server and share names, however.

[kallisti5]

Bonjour supports _nfs._tcp. Complete list here: ​https://developer.apple.com/library/content/qa/qa1312/_index.html

I wrote a tiny SSDP library, but as you said upnp doesn't (normally) do nfs.

libmicrossdp :( $ ./a.out 
Discovered 13 devices:
	'urn:schemas-upnp-org:device:Printer:1' - 'http://192.168.1.144:5200/Printer.xml'
	'239.255.255.250:1900' - 'http://192.168.1.136:80/description.xml'
	'239.255.255.250:1900' - 'http://192.168.1.136:80/description.xml'
	'239.255.255.250:1900' - 'http://192.168.1.136:80/description.xml'
	'239.255.255.250:1900' - 'http://192.168.1.136:80/description.xml'
	'239.255.255.250:1900' - 'http://192.168.1.136:80/description.xml'
	'239.255.255.250:1900' - 'http://192.168.1.136:80/description.xml'
	'239.255.255.250:1900' - 'http://192.168.1.136:80/description.xml'
	'239.255.255.250:1900' - 'http://192.168.1.136:80/description.xml'
	'239.255.255.250:1900' - 'http://192.168.1.136:80/description.xml'
	'239.255.255.250:1900' - 'http://192.168.1.136:80/description.xml'
	'239.255.255.250:1900' - 'http://192.168.1.136:80/description.xml'
	'239.255.255.250:1900' - 'http://192.168.1.136:80/description.xml'

Unfortunately everyone has their own "standard" and consensus of something so fundamental was never reached. Anything we do in terms of automatic location of local network resources will likely need to be an aggregation of multiple inputs.

• nfs - Bonjour / mDNS
• iscsi - iSCSI Discovery