On 12/03/2016 11:01 PM, Jon Stanley wrote: I think it would be best to have this discussion with Andreas Nilsson (CCed), who is the Cockpit UX designer. Andreas, the basic question is this: When exporting a new shared directory via NFS, should this UI also support/allow the creation of *new* volumes on the host machine? We currently have volume creation available in the storage functionality backed by storaged, of course. Do we need to provide a second, parallel implementation for the NFS sharing UI? There are pros and cons, of course. Pros: * In cases where the user is creating a new volume expressly for sharing, it might be a complicated workflow to go 1) to the storage tab and create a volume and then 2) go to the sharing tab separately and share the volume. Cons: * It means having two possible ways to do the same task, which may be confusing for the user too.[1] * It means another path for QA to test. If we decided to do this, we could opt to take a limited approach such as providing an option to create a new directory if free space was available in one or more logical volumes on the system, mounted to a well-known location on the disk. If free space isn't available, maybe offer to forward the user to the storage tab to do more advanced, custom configuration? [1] Since they're using the same underlying implementation, either view should reflect any changes made by the other, so that is probably a mitigating factor.

On 12/05/2016 08:20 AM, Andreas Nilsson wrote: I'm actually not sure we're going to have a "workflow" at the command-line. Since we're planning to back as much of this as possible with Ansible, I would expect this to be a declarative interface rather than an interactive one. In which case, we would need to handle the storage creation and sharing as two independent steps. (It's important to note that, due to technology limitations, "under the hood" this will always need to happen in two steps, because storage always has to exist and be mounted before the NFS daemon can start offering it). I added a link to the Synology Disk Station interface.