Cross-Mounted Network Mounts

Black Hole

May contain traces of nut
If one were to set up a bilateral mount using SMB/CIFS, would it create a deadly embrace?

My reasoning goes like this: I have a Samba mount of my HDR on my HD, and my HD can see the HDR Media folder containing My Video, My Music, My Photo, and my external drives. The mount is seen by the HD as a virtual USB drive.

If I were to mount the HD on my HDR (or more likely set up a bilateral share between two HDRs), would the virtual USB mount also be in the list of external drives sent back to the other mount, to be included in the mount... If it turns out to be recursive like this, it need not cause an actual problem, it depends if the whole path gets walked in the process of mounting (in which case the process could loop until it crashes).

Setting the folder option (so the mount appears as a folder in My Video instead of as a virtual USB) is not likely to be any better, unless by any chance the mounts are excluded from the next mount.

NFS is less likely to be a problem because it does not include USB drives in the mount (a disadvantage in other ways).
 
This seems to offer some experimental evidence:
Object:- To play recordings with full transport control (viz fast forward fast rewind etc.) from one Humax to another Humax through a [Shared] directory in My Videos.

It is not possible for both Humax's to act as Client and Server. So you need to decide which direction suits you best, from 1 to 2 or 2 to 1, but not in both directions.

I imagine this is the consequence of my postulated deadly embrace. It may be okay to have samba and cifs installed on one machine at the same time, as long as the one is not mounting into the other (even via a second machine).

What I have in mind comprises a central HDR with satellite HDs and a satellite HDR. The current set-up with one satellite HD uses SMB via automount to access the HDR, complete with external drives. I am thinking I can tap into the same share for the other satellites (including the HDR), and to access the satellite HDR (which will not need external drives) set up another share which avoids sharing the virtual USB which is the mounted central HDR.

I might try doing this with SMB to see if it is possible, but NFS for this mount should work in that it is reported to only share one file system at a time.
 
You should be fine as long as you don't mount the remote HDR into the My Video space on the local one, and even then it should be ok with NFS.
 
Yes this type of arrangement works and does not seem to recurse.

I have an ext HDD with two partitions for the HD box which mount as drive1 and drive2. The HDR is nfs mounted with network automount as downstairs and decrypted plays with full control.

Both external "drives" are auto mounted on the HDR as /media/upstairs1 and /media/upstairs2.
I then use mount --bind to bind these folders to ones in the My Video subtree.

Content from drive1 is copied to drive2 using HDR mode and is then playable on the HDR again with full control.

The "downstairs" folder shows the bind destination folders but no content is displayed. In other words, no recursion.
 
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