NFS Mounts in Catalina 10.15 Not Working After Upgrade

Lots of people still use NFS especially in Linux to Linux environments in my case NFS always outperformed SMB shares. Like I said in my post everything appears to be working correctly under the hood this seems to be a bug with Finder. At least in my case not sure about OP. OP have you tried mounting from the terminal?

I'm having a similar problem I mount my nfs share with this command i used to mount it at /mnt before catalina upgrade but now it won't let me create mount point there.

sudo mount -t nfs -o resvport 192.168.1.70:/mnt/zshare mnt/zshare

now i can mount it in my home directory and everything seems to be fine browsing from the terminal and using ls command to list files but if I try to browse the share from Finder there are missing files and directories. I'll mess around with it some more and update if I figure anything out.

Be careful about reading random blogs on the internet. It is certainly true that Apple has made the file system layout more complex in Catalina, but it isn’t as complicated as that blog makes it out to be.

The reason you are seeing the same files in both locations is because there is only one location. You should continue to use and look at the file system the same way you always have. There have certainly been changes underneath, but Apple has gone to great effort to ensure that you don’t have to deal with those changes in normal circumstances.

That being said, mounting NFS shares is not exactly normal. It is rarely done anymore and not well supported. Certain directories more more amenable to NFS mounting than others. I’m not aware of /Users/Shared being a problem, but then I’ve never heard of anyone using that mount point either. Since you are having a problem, I would say avoid that location for now. For now, for debugging purposes, I suggest mounting in an existing, non-special directory like /tmp. That should work and you should be able to better gauge how it works at that location.

As far as network disks go, I would recommend SMB these days, if you can do that. Unfortunately, I would also recommend a real SMB mount, with your machine bound to an Active Directory domain. That is a configuration that could be expected to work and be supported. I realize that might not be possible. I just wanted to point out that there are very few people doing NFS mounts on Macs these days.

And finally, I’m not sure what you expect from this mount. You said you were using 10.14 before. I can’t remember the OS version I last used with a network mount. It was relatively recent, maybe Sierra or High Sierra. But event with a well-run SMB Active Directory network, really fast throughput, and fully functional auto mount, the Finder really struggled with network mounts. Quicklook would quickly (no pun intended) bring it to its knees. I normally didn’t risk actually opening a file on a network. I would normally copy it locally, make my changes, and then copy it back to the network. I’m afraid a Mac just isn’t a “business machine” anymore. Don’t get your hopes up.

tspiers84 wrote:

Lots of people still use NFS especially in Linux to Linux environments in my case NFS always outperformed SMB shares. Like I said in my post everything appears to be working correctly under the hood this seems to be a bug with Finder.

Certainly. But this is not Linux Support Communities. 😄 Networking can be very tricky. There is no way to tell if your SMB connection was optimal or if your experiences could be repeated on someone else’s machines.

Your suggestion to test using the command line in the Terminal is very good. The only problem is there are lots of variables to consider about how to mount, where to mount, and who should do the mounting. Then square that number of variables because you also have to review them all on the server too. Catalina is brand new. Since very few people have tried NFS in Catalina, anyone attempting it is going to have to do it on their own.

I would say that networked file systems, in general, are buggy on the Mac. I developed a really cool app once that I had to abandon just because it wasn’t viable due to the number of OS bugs. That was on 10.8. I’m sure it hasn’t gotten any better. There is no guarantee the problem is because of the Finder. It just so happens that the Finder is a true beast when it comes to file system access. I learned all about that when I was working on that app. When you open a folder in the Finder, it will open about 4 network connections. It will make a number of initial queries, often repeatedly. Then it goes through and opens each file and reads it. Every one. In most cases, it will just stop reading, but not gracefully. It just drops the network connection. Just opening a folder with the Finder is a serious stress-test on a server. Only the thing I found worse was trying to decompress a zip file using the built-in Archive Utility. The thing is, when I found bugs, they were in the network layer. I needed the Finder or Archive Utility to trigger them. But once it hit, even Terminal access to the share was affected. Therefore, it’s technically not the Finder. I know it doesn’t really matter. I’m just saying this to convey the scope of the challenge ahead of you. You want to open a network connection other than SMB to a server that doesn’t have a full-time, paid IT support, all I can say is good luck.