NFS mounts from a NT system to a HP Unix system

[Belinda Dermody]

I am trying to mount a partition from one of our NT systems to my HP-UX Unix system, the problem is that the partition name has a space in it ex: L:\CLient Svs, I have other partitions mounted from this same server but they do not have a space in the partition name. Any clues to correct, I have used a "\ " and double qouted the string in the fstab file but I still get the error msg

mount: ignoring incomplete/incorrect entry for lisbon:l:/client\ in /etc/fstab

[Chan 007]

I am not sure about this,

but you ave a tool in NT to share, why can't you share it without space and try our luck.

Chan

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Long before you worry about fstab syntax (which is gonna be dicey, at best), you need to find out if you can explicitly mount
this guy. I'm betting you can because contrary to popular belief, spaces are perfectly legitimate in UNIX pathnames --- they're just state of the art stupid -- and tend to break many otherwise fine scripts.

Try this:

mount -F nfs -o rw,soft,intr "pchost:L/Client Sys" /myunix mountdir

If that works then you can craft an rc script to mount and umount the filesystem.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Ooops, there should not be a space in the /myunixmountdir mountpoint just in your remote filesystem name.

mount -F nfs -o rw,soft,intr "pchost:L/Client Sys" /myunixmountdir

[Bill Hassell]

When you decide to exchange files between unrelated systems, be prepared for the unique (and often incompatible) features in each system. As you are seeing, spaces in a filename or directory name, while somewhat transparent in the PC world, will take a *lot* of work to protect the standard field separator for Unix systems. Spaces in filenames first appeared in Macs when people were still using Windows 3.1 (no spaces allowed) so later Windows versions allowed names with spaces. Even Windows has to protect the spaces in some contexts.

Similarly, Windows does not recognize the difference between UPPERCASE and lowercase, yet these two character sets are unique in Unix.

Save yourself a *lot* of troubles getting this and other 'special' characters in filenames and directory names (like # @ $ % * [ ] ; \) by restricting exports and imports to simple alphanumeric characters, all lowercase. This goes for both Windows as well as HP-UX (and other systems like Macs and Linux and mainframes, etc).

[Belinda Dermody]

Sorry I was out for the weekend, Clay I tried yours it looked like it worked but bdf gives me a error message and I can not umount the process.
I did a
umount -F nfs -o rw,soft,intr "lisbon:L/Client Svcs/Data Services/global_research" /mnt

and now when I do a bdf I get the following error.

bdf: Svcs/Data: No such file or directory

Any way I can clear this up without a reboot...

[Belinda Dermody]

Well with further investigation, I see that the NT server is mounted to my HP system, but the error shows up on the bdf command and wont be listed. I can get to that temporary mount /mnt and see the directories that I want and need and I can touch and delete files. But I can not umount it and mount it to the correct path on my HP system, I can change my script to point to /mnt while I work this out...