All the PCs here at the Fortress of Solitude run Ubuntu, so when I installed a new server it made sense to use NFS for file-sharing. I made that decision because NFS just works and is much easier to set-up than Samba Windows CIFS.
Everything worked well except for two bugs:
- Ubuntu Unity 2D would crash
- Viewing directories that contained many PDF files would freeze the desktop
The first bug had a fairly easy workaround but it took longer to track down a solution for the second. Of course, I would have found the source of the problem more quickly if I had just looked at the log on my client PC!:
[...] apparmor="DENIED" operation="sendmsg" parent=1 profile="/usr/bin/evince-thumbnailer" [...] [...] kernel: [ 708.816888] nfs: RPC call returned error 13
In other words, the evince-thumbnailer cannot create thumbnail previews for pdf documents because it is being denied access to the network by AppArmor. Which leads us to Ubuntu Bug #778638 where a fix has been released. See the bug report for the fix that can be applied manually or by installing updated Evince software packages from the Ubuntu Natty Proposed repository.