Include nfs-utils in SteamOS

[kiseitai2]

I already notified support about this humble request for a future update to SteamOS. The ticket was HT-FX44-4N2N-JB68. Gervy was kind to point me to this forum in addition to forwarding my suggestion internally.

Essentially, in my use case, I have a samba network mount mounted automatically via fstab and hooked directly to Steam such that Steam can automatically detect my game library (residing on my server) when I am in the local network (docked). Unfortunately, samba has a few issues on Linux (since roughly last year). It makes Steam think that the one steamapps directory is present twice on the filesystem (steamapps and as SteamApps). Also, the Steam client gets Write Errors when updating some of the games despite having the correct permissions and permission masks. Let me be clear, this is likely a CIFS issue and not a Steam issue.

Fortunately, the work around I had was to switch from samba to NFS v4. It has performance improvements for games over the network too. At any rate, it seems that SteamOS lacks the nfs-utils package from upstream Arch in its image. As a result, I could not set the mount in fstab as an nfs mount. Would it be possible to include this package into the SteamOS image in a future update (next update? :) )? Should I meddle with pacman directly (appeared uninitialized when I first ran it)? If I manually install the package through pacman, would it get erased on the next update from stable?

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Someone can probably help you in either...

SteamOS forum... https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamuniverse/discussions/1/

Steam for Linux forum...

https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/

[Satoru]

Samba does not have 'a few issues on linux' unless you're running SMB1 or SMB2. All you need to have SMB 3.0 and it works fine. Unless the literal hundreds of Linux servers that I run CIFS on is somehow magically 'not working' all of a sudden, which would be shocking given that my phone would be ringing off the hook if that was th ecase

Now im not saying having nfs in steamdeck wouldn't be nice, but i'm abit wary of your assertion that samba is somehow 'broken'

[Crashed]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Samba does not have 'a few issues on linux' unless you're running SMB1 or SMB2. All you need to have SMB 3.0 and it works fine. Unless the literal hundreds of Linux servers that I run CIFS on is somehow magically 'not working' all of a sudden, which would be shocking given that my phone would be ringing off the hook if that was th ecase

Now im not saying having nfs in steamdeck wouldn't be nice, but i'm abit wary of your assertion that samba is somehow 'broken'

Note that SMB 3.0 is available on all recent Samba versions, but on MS Windows requires at least Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012. SMB2 while a bit obsolete isn't yet deprecated in MS Windows or Samba.

[lightwo]

Just throwing a simple workaround: Whenever you run into the issue of incorrect file capitalisation on Steam or Source games (and possibly other software mainly developed with NTFS in mind), try using all lowercase. I don't mess with Samba because configuring it is a total mess, but hoping nothing else turns out to be an issue, it could work.

[kiseitai2]

I configured samba to be on SMB 3.1.1, so that might not be it. My samba configuration is nothing special, so there is no reason for it to return both path names when only one directory exists on the file system (case sensitivity does not matter here). My suspicion is that CIFS is responding to path checks in a case insensitive manner. Meaning, when Steam asks if steamapps exists, it will return True and when Steam asks if SteamApps exists it will also return true despite there only being one directory. This may not be happening with all filesystem APIs because dolphin sees the correct path name. It is also not unheard for different utilities to behave differently when accessing network mounts (old tcsh vs Python scripts come to mind).

I'm a Linux person so thankfully it is not a case of interactions between samba and Windows versions (I stay away from Windows on my home infrastructure except for a few VMs).

Now, it is very likely that my configuration has to be further tweaked beyond my basic setup or that I am making a subtle mistake. I do not profess to know everything. Ever since getting used to gaming on NFS, I have ignored further reading on samba configurations. With that said, including NFS should not be an issue since it is already a common package upstream. I would install it directly if someone can confirm that system updates do not wipe user deltas on the image. I also saw that pacman needs to be initialized on my vanilla install of SteamOS, which is odd for an Arch distro unless Valve wants to curate the image.

But hey, I could also be hallucinating my issues with samba since this is a simulation and the matrix could have glitched.

My latest google searches suggest a few server side settings I know I do not have in my smb conf.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/5999
https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamPlay/comments/gnksic/cant_play_games_from_smb_share/