Getting error "Network path Not found" after running dir command from Windows NFS client
While working on an access issue on Windows NFS clients, we found out that the ‘dir’ command does not work for a share which is exported through smb and NFS both. Once we run the dir command against the NFS share, it expects the share to be SMB and tries to access via smb protocol and not NFS.
Even pushing the NFS to the top of the Network provider list and restarting the client for NFS service, we could see the same issue.
The NFS client was Windows 2003 R2 and the NFS server was Solaris 10. Running the showmount against the Solaris server we could see multiple NFS shares. One of the share was a NFS export only and other was NFS + SMB export.
We ran the below command on both the shares from Windows client:
- “dir \\NFS server\nfsshare" ==> Worked and gave output
- “dir \\NFS server\nfssmbshare” ==> "No network found"
To make things clear collected netmon traces for working and non-working condition. For non-working there were no NFS packet and for working there were multiple NFS packet.
We suggested the following workaround for this:
- Have a share which is exported via NFS only.
- From the Korn shell ‘ls’ command against the NFS+SMB share and it worked.
- Also the start command from the command prompt worked.
Even though the ‘dir’ command gives an error, but rest all commands works on the NFS+SMB share. Also there is no issues mounting and accessing the NFS share.