I have a fat32 filesystem sitting on a NAS storage device (nslu2) that I need to mount on my Ubuntu system. I've tried Samba and NFS mounts, but both don't seem to support proper locking. More specifically, I am unable to save files to the mounted drive through GNUcash, KeepassX etc, which makes the share fairly useless.

Is there a protocol that allows me to achieve this ? Note that the NAS storage device is running a linux OS so I can run pretty much any protocol that has a linux implementation.

The only option I'm not looking for is to reformat the partition to ext3, which I'm not able to do due to other constraints.

Alternatively, has anyone managed proper locking of a fat32 system over the network using Samba ?

Or, is advisory locking the best you get with a network-mounted fat32 file system ?

I've thought of trying sshfs but I've not found any indication that this will solve my problem.

Edit: Okay, maybe I can reformat the drive, but to any file system except ext3. The "unslung" nslu2 doesn't like more than one ext3 drive, and I already have one attached. So any solution that involves reformatting the drive to ntfs, hfs etc is fine, as long as I can mount it on linux and lock files.