NFS question

[Stephen Burke]

While I have not yet been able to completely abandon M$ around here, at 
least whatever hard drive has windows on it is also now dual-booted with 
some flavor of GNU/Linux against the inevitable time when the M$ side 
simply crashes and burns for no apparent reason (which seems to be 
happening regularly).

One of the final hurdles has been to find a flavor  of linux that would 
play nicely with my usb2 external hard drive.

I have found that flavor here: http://www.blagblagblag.org/
I have mentioned BLAG here before, but that was fc1, and this is 3.

It's sort of a FC3 without the hassle for those of us hammering on 
ancient hardware and unwilling to replace it while it still works. 
BLAG3000 works beautifully on it.

The main job of that PII is just to share what's on the usb drive, which 
it does a pretty good job of. I have been sharing the drive with samba, 
but I would rather not, if I can help it.

The Linux NFS-HOWTO (which is about all I've been able to find on the 
subject -copies availble far and wide) uses the command

# mount master.foo.com:/home /mnt/home

but I don't know the command for mounting in a workgroup setting without 
the .com. Trying just mount master:/media/usbdrive /home/qfwfq/usbdrive 
gives me:

mount: can't get address for master

I was using "mount -t smbfs //master/usbdrive /home/qfwfq/usbdrive" 
before without difficulty (except with fedora, where they apparently 
were determined to break the samba that had been working perfectly in 
RH9 -another reason to need NFS), so I am not sure what that address 
error means.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

S.