Copyright Christophe Gros 2004-2005-2006 <skylendar_REMOVE_ME_@yahoo.com>

Vsman is a utility that has been designed for volume (directory) sharing management on the server side. So far, it only manages NFS v3 and v4, but can be extended to others volume sharing systems.

You can select a NFS v4 server interface in the preferences dialog box. Otherwise, invoke vsman with the flag '-4' in order to display the NFS v4 specific mounting options when needed.

Vsman must be run as root. It displays on the left a tree view of known directories with their possible accesses, i.e. client hosts that can mount directories from the server where vsman is running. Each directory is displayed with a green, yellow or red spot. * Green if the directory is exported but not mounted. * Yellow when exported and mounted.
* Red when unexported.

When you double-click on an access, the left side shows its mounting options.

You can obviously declare a new volume. Vsman just asks you the name of the corresponding directory. You can of course create or delete accesses for the current volume. When you create one, a dialog box appears, that asks you the suitable host name, network name or address or netgroup name.
If the host filed is empty, the networks field is then tested, and if empty again, the netgroup is selected.

If you select "NIS" instead of "Files" in the preferences dialog box, the hosts, networks, users and groups will be directly fetched from the given NIS domain name. For more info about NIS, read the corresponding HOWTO documentation.

Selecting the Reexport menu will reexport all and synchronize vsman with the exported volumes declared in /etc/exports. Double-click on a mounting host and select Unexport Host in the Action menu, and the current volume will be unexported from the corresponding volume.
Unexport whole volume will do the same thing, but for all the mounting hosts. The Start / Stop menu will stop or restart all the sharings.

The Save menu will write the NFS /etc/exports file and reexport all the volumes.

In the Preferences dialog box, a button named Hostname lookup has been added. When checked, vsman will try to display the name of the mounting hosts, instead of their IP addresses. If not possible, a question mark is added after the displayable value.

This tool has been written in Ada 95, using gtkada 2.4 as the toolkit. Don't forget to install gnat 3.4.1 or later. Gnat is now a component of the gcc suite.

NOTE

It seems that it isn't always possible to know the exact identity of the mounting hosts, especially when their accesses come from declared networks or wildcard qualified names, e.g. *.mynet.org. Actually, the rpc Mountlist is too confusing to be correctly interpreted. So, I had to content myself with a simpler processing, although partially wrong: when a volume is dismounted from a remote host, vsman can't always reflect this event, for the remote host is often still registered within the NFS server.