About

I’m Elliott Ecton, the mildly obsessive operator of nfs.ninja, a blog dedicated to the fine (and occasionally infuriating) art of Network Attached Storage.

By day, I’m NetApp’s Technical Marketing Engineer for NFS, SMB, TCP/IP, and FlexCache. Yes, that means I get paid to talk about all of them--even the ones I side-eye. That'd be you,  SMB.

My true NAS passion remains NFS: elegant, performant, and very low-drama. You’ll find blabbing about ONTAP, Linux clients, TCP/IP stack behavior, AI as a force multiplier, and plenty of  troubleshooting advice since you are likely not doing it right. SMB and I… we’re on speaking terms, mostly for the sake of multi-protocol sanity. Though I still can’t quite forgive macOS for willingly defaulting to SMB instead of just mounting NFS like any self-respecting Unix descendant. 🤔

FlexCache gets its own special corner because caching your hottest data closer to where it’s needed is one of those features that, believe it or not, still can't defy the laws of physics.

Here you’ll get meticulously over or under-thought guides, lab-fueled observations, and the occasional self-deprecating confession, like the many times I’ve placed far too much faith in a network engineer’s solemn declaration that “the network is fine” because ping returned a few green packets. I won't make that mistake anymore.

I run the site from the scenic flatlands of Wichita, KS because someone has to champion the protocols and operating systems that just work, while quietly judging the ones that require group hugs and frequent reboots . Am I biased toward clean NFS implementations and proper Linux-centric NAS? Guilty. Do I lose sleep over it? Only when the troubleshooting rabbit hole extends past 9PM sharp.

If you appreciate rock-solid NFSv4.2, well-tuned ONTAP SVMs, efficient TCP/IP flows, FlexCache magic, and the quiet satisfaction of a problem that stays solved, you’re in good company.

If you’re deep in the SMB trenches…the comment section is open. I promise to respond with nothing but mild, professional disappointment--and maybe a troubleshooting tip anyway.

What the heck is an NFS Ninja anyways?

An NFS Ninja is someone who can make NFSv4.2 sing across a flaky WAN, kerberize it in their sleep, and doesn’t panic when the user ‘nobody’ mysteriously takes ownership of every file during a name-service update.

It’s the quiet satisfaction of seeing showmount -e behave on the first try. It’s knowing FlexCache actually delivers when configured correctly, and quietly judging anyone who believes “just throw more bandwidth at it” qualifies as troubleshooting.

Mostly, though, an NFS Ninja has accepted their fate: they will forever be the person in the room politely explaining why their protocol is superior, while secretly wondering how everyone else has survived this long on hope, reboots, and SMB.

If you put an NFS Ninja in a room of 100 people, they would likely rank in the top 99. And yes--my NFS is bigger than yours. (I measured it in IOPS.)

Welcome to nfs.ninja.

May your latency be low, your bytes-in-flight high, your mounts succeed on the first try, your FlexCache hits be plentiful, your AI-assisted debugging accurate, and your protocol choices… mostly defensible.