Currently I have Volumio set up as multiroom, accessing a server via an nfs mount. It works almost perfectly. I’m trying to work out how I would access this from outside that network, when I am on vacation. I am very familiar with port forwarding, etc but not sure if that is the answer. In my setup, it seems the “master” (for want of a better term) Volumio instance, the one containing the multiroom group, accesses the nfs mount and then multicasts the music to the group members. Obviously I don’t care whether the music is playing in the rest of the house if I’m on vacation, so if I had to temporarily break that in order to have remote music access, that would be fine. Does anyone know if this is possible?
(The other option is to buy a 512gb sd card and copy all my music to it and be done with the whole problem, but it’d be cool to access what’s already there. I used to do exactly that with plexamp, it’s on the same server, but plexamp is lacking the multiroom functionality, which is the most important to me.)
Buy the SD card.
Exporting NFS over the internet is one of those things where, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. If you have to ask how, you defintely shouldn’t. Because you will leave a gaping hole in your firewall and get pwned. You could secure the NFS export with a VPN but that is an additional layer of hurt.
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yea, good point. I just realized that I have a spare pi 4b and a 5tb usb drive lying around doing nothing, so I think I’ll try using Volumio in stand-alone mode, that way I only have to rsync the music once (right before leaving for vacation, etc.) (And to your point, I was going to use a vpn but as you said, another layer of hurt, and real hard to troubleshoot/fix when out of the house. yea, been there, done that with plex already, but it works fine now.) Also, using Volumio allows me to control the music via phone, tablet and laptop. I’m sure there are tons of other ways to do it, but I paid for a year of Volumio, might as well use it, and I’m familiar with it.
You gotta love that answer 
So, my dad asked if I could set it up so he could listen to his music stored on his NAS at his city house—from his countryside house. I said, “Sure, easy peasy! I’ll just set up a WireGuard VPN tunnel between both houses, and then Volumio at House B can mount the NFS share from the NAS at House A.”
But, as mattsuk pointed out, it’s not quite that straightforward. I’ve granted NFS permissions to the specific user, configured everything, but the mount just isn’t happening. I’ll keep trying, though. If I make any progress, I’ll be sure to share the details here! mount… will keep on trying, should I get any advance, I will share it!
Yeah, you can make it work remotely, but it’s a bit of a pain. NFS isn’t really built with remote access in mind, it’s more for local networks, so exposing it over the internet isn’t ideal from a security standpoint. You’d be better off setting up a VPN (like WireGuard or OpenVPN) into your home network. That way, your remote device can access the Volumio master like it’s still local. I’ve done this with Pi setups before and it works smoothly once it’s set up.
That said, for vacations, I went the SD card route eventually, way less hassle on the go. Just keep a mirror of your library and you’re good to go.
I’ve done it. I’ve got a NAS sharing an NFS folder in house A and then I’ve got volumio in a raspberry Pi installed in house B. Between both houses there’s a VPN tunnel (wireguard) that links both LANs, so devices can see each other. It works, the problem is that after one day or so, the mount gets lost and I have to reboot volumio and re-mount the folder. There must be something related with the way volumio mounts the folder. But since there are no options to configure (such as * hard,intr, * tcp, * timeo=14 , * retrans=3 , * nolock) I can’t solve the situation.
Is there anybody there with experience in keeping alive the NFS mounts in volumio?
Are you sure it’s the NFS mount that’s the problem and not the VPN dropping?
You could test with a simple script to ping the RPI from the NAS and the NAS from the RPI.
Personally, I’m sharing music from my home NAS using SMB and connecting from a RPI Zero player in my office over a site to site L2TP/IPSec VPN. Just checked it’s still connected after not being used for a month.