Solaris and OS X Playing Together

After winning my iPhone in a raffle, I was told by those who raffled it off that it was purchased before the price drop, and as a result, I could get the $100 credit.  What better to spend it on than upgrading to Leopard?  After all, a system with DTrace, DTrace-enabled Ruby, and a friendly GUI to boot is too good to pass up when you only have to pay $40 after taxes and credit. So I spent about 6 hours backing up my data to my Solaris box.  Why so long?  Well, I could not make Tiger and Solaris 10 play nicely with file sharing, so I had to resort to using scp to move 32GB of data.  Not pleasant.  I’d tried getting Tiger to mount NFS shares, but with little (read: no) success. So naturally one of the first things I did with my machine after installing Leopard, Firefox, and Adium was start poking around in the settings.  I quickly found a “Show Advanced” button in the Directory Utility.  And what appeared?  A tab for network mounts!  All I did was add a quick entry of the form you’d expect, start NFS on my Solaris machine, and voila!  Immediate access to my backups over NFS.  This is great - it means I can easily restore my iTunes collection to the fresh install of Leopard.  The ease with which this was done makes me suspect I missed something glaringly obvious in Tiger. Of course, a few things remain to be dealt with:

• Supporting read/write access - just unifying the UID of my account on both machines.
• Denying read access to other clients - probably just changing the permissions in my home directory.
• Getting my Mac to dynamically resolve the hostname of my S10 box - we use DHCP on my home network, and I don’t want to change this.

Now, here’s to hoping this will get me to do more work on my ruby-on-rails project while I’m flying between coasts the next few weeks!