Filesystem change notification over NFS

Question

I have the following setup:

• Host machine: Ubuntu 13.04 (64-bit)
• Guest machine on Virtualbox: Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS (32-bit)

I'm working on a project that lives inside the VirtualBox guest. I edit the files using Sublime Text over a NFS share. I'm using NFS since I believe it's offers the best speed for guest->host sharing, which is helpful when I'm doing big searches from the editor or running visual tools like gitk on the host.

This works well, but there's one issue: Sublime normally notices any changes in the project immediately and refreshes the project tree. Over the NFS share, however, it only notices some changes (new or removed files) when I save a file. Generally I often end up using "rescan folders" manually, like after switching branches in the repository.

Is there a configuration flag for NFS that would make the file notification messages communicated? (What is this notification mechanism called, while we're at it?)

If not, would you recommend switching to Samba or SSHFS?

This is the relevant fstab entry:

flatline:/home/kos  /mnt/vm10   nfs noauto,noatime,intr

Answer 1

I think it might be worth playing around with different network file systems, as they likely have different methods for notifying the OS (and hence ST3) when files are created, modified, or destroyed. I don't know enough about the different ones (or which mount options to use) to recommend a specific one - GIYF :) I've had good luck before with SSHFS/FUSE mounting Linux shares on my Mac, so maybe try that one first. NFS is an old and fairly minimally-featured file system, as is SMB, so maybe SSH will work. Good luck!