OS X file locking over NFS

On my home network I have an old FreeBSD-based machine used as a central file server. It's used to share various directories via all manner of protocols such as NFS and SMB/CIFS; and importantly, home directories via NFS where possible.

For a while now though, I didn't have file locking working from my Mac as allowing any rpcbind allocated ports through firewalls is of course a massive pain. I just lived without. This had the unfortunate side effect though that occasionally an application would refuse to unzip/unarchive properly unless I moved it to a local drive first, and worse, most sqlitedb based applications not working quite right (or not at all.)

Thankfully, the latest 6.3 release of FreeBSD finally allows static port allocation of rpc.statd and rpc.lockd in addition to mountd (which has been there for a while.) So after upgrading my file server I eagerly locked these ports down, finally allowed the appropriate holes through the firewall, and rebooted my Mac as the final test.

And all seems to be good. :) It's early days though. But my quick test passed with flying colours (installed and fired up Miro and it worked - I've had a bug logged in their tracking system for a while regarding install problems on remotely mounted directories.)

So, fingers crossed that all the other apps I've had to work around by sym' linking out to a local directory (like SyncServices...) will now start working as well once I move them back...