Does anyone have a recommendation for an NFS client for Vista Home Premium? Preferably open source, but I'll take free (as in beer) if that's not available or even a commercial product if it is clearly the best option.
I know there is a client built into Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Vista, but I'd rather not upgrade just for NFS.
Never really found a good one, may want to consider a VM and Live CD of Linux, it is what I have had to do in the past. I got so fed up with the process that the upgrade to Business sounded like a blessing after only a couple weeks of the solution I mentioned. If you have any control over this server or can request SAMBA or SFTP be installed you could also do that.
Unless performance is a concern, I'd recommend using SftpDrive, which lets you map an actual drive letter over SSH. It's really a great product, and on a local network the transfer speeds are slower than samba, but not terrible.
On a local network, Samba is the best option.
Since Windows Services for Unix seems that it won't install on Windows Vista Home Premium, I can only add another option that might be of use:
WinSCP is a freeware program allowing FTP/SFTP/SCP file operations to a system with an SSH server. Although it's not exactly what you want, you can drag&drop files from an Explorer window to the WinSCP window (works both ways, actually), and it also has an option (☞ Preferences → ◎ Explorer-like) that makes it look like a plain windows explorer window. However, this allows only GUI operations, not programmatic ones.
Samba is never an answer to any Linux system administrator - even a hobbyist. Why? Well, it opens a security hole that you could drive a truck through. That hole is Windows compatibility. Whenever Linux users try to make things work and play nice with Windows, Microsoft makes things more difficult for them In fact, maybe some of you didn't hear, but Microsoft even sued over Samba recently and lost. I look for Microsoft to make SAMBA inoperable in the near future with their "innovations" and changing the file system. NFS is the only real solution for serious file systems.
Microsoft will never again allow just anyone to get their NFS systems to mount on Vista. They wrote Windows Services for Unix that worked well in XP, and made certain that they only included it in the highest priced versions of their operating system bundles so that users would be forced to pay extra to be able to use files they have on a free server. Why? So that they can try to convince you that you don't need the UNIX box any longer, since Windows Server is so easy to use. Nevermind the fact that it is a nightmare to administer properly.
The solution? Well, you probably have a computer that won't run Vista lying around. No, not your Linux box, the other one. The one that ran XP. Just install XP on that one, add in the "Services for Unix" patch from Microsoft, and mount the NFS shares on that system. Then you share those mounted filesystems as Windows shares and mount them on the Vista machines. You have a bottleneck at the XP server, but if you aren't using this for streaming video, it should do fine. If you are, consider copying the file to a temporary location on the Vista box and deleting when you are done. Alternatively, use CygWin.