Mounting a Linux NFS on OS X

After upgrading to OS X Mavericks, I was a bit confused when I couldn't play any Röyksopp off my NFS server. It turns out the ö character was preventing reads from completing successfully, but Finder was still able to retrieve a directory listing.

Apparently Mac OS X doesn't enable support for normalizing UTF-8 file names by default. This means that occasionally the representation of a file name on the client and server can differ. Fortunately, this is fixed easily by enabling the nfc mount option, which tells OS X to normalize NFS paths using Normalization Form Canonical Composition (NFC).

The other issue I've been having is that disconnecting from the server without first unmounting causes all filesystem operations to stall for 30 seconds or so. I recently found out that this is due to OS X treating NFS mounts as uninterruptible by default, meaning that fs calls to them will block until the server responds, or until the mount completely times out and disconnects. This is fixed by enabling the intr option, which causes calls to fail with EINTR when the server becomes unresponsive.

To apply these options as the default for every mount, add the following line to /etc/nfs.conf:

nfs.client.mount.options = nfc,intr

After doing that, the regular "Connect to Server" function of Finder will use these options as well. See man mount_nfs for more options.