Author – A.
Kishore/Sachin
http://appsdba.info
Step by Step NFS Configuration
Introduction
The Network File System is certainly one of the most widely used network services.
Network file system (NFS) is based on the Remote procedure call. It allows the client to
auto mount and therefore, transparently access the remote file systems on the network. It
is used to share/map disk from one Linux System to other Linux System. NFS was developed
to allow the user to access remote directory as a mapped directory. NFS is not a single
program. It is a suite of related programs, which work together.
In this document we will export the file system from the linux1.com (IP address
192.168.114.231) host and mount it on linux2.com (IP address 192.168.114.232).
Prerequisites
(1) Verify NFS daemon Service
Here we assume that the NFS service daemon is already installed on our system, including
portmap daemon on which NFS setup depends. One more thing, our system needs to
support the NFS file system.For this we need to issue the following command:
$ cat /proc/filesystems
Another way to check if NFS is functioning is to use following “rpcinfo”
command.
$ rpcinfo -p
We should get a response/output
(2) (a) Server export file
All NFS server exports need to be defined in /etc/exports file.
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Author – A.Kishore/Sachin
http://appsdba.info
Most common exports options:
/home/nfs/ 192.168.114.232(rw,sync) export /home/nfs directory for
host with IP 192.168.114.232 with
read, write permissions, and
synchronized mode
/home/nfs/ 192.168.114.232 (ro,sync) export /home/nfs directory for
network 192.168.114.232 netmask
255.255.255.0 with read only
permissions and synchronized
mode
/home/nfs/ 192.168.114.232 (rw,sync) 192.168.114.233 (ro,sync) export /home/nfs directory for
host with IP 192.168.114.232 with
read, write permissions,
synchronized mode, and also
export /home/nfs directory for
hosts with IP 192.168.114.233 with
read only permissions and
synchronized mode
/home/nfs/ 192.168.114.232 (rw,sync,no_root_squash) export /home/nfs directory for
host with IP 192.168.114.232 with
read, write permissions,
synchronized mode and the
remote root user will be treated as
a root and will be able to change
any file and directory.
/home/nfs/ *(ro,sync) export /home/nfs directory for any
host with a read only permission
and synchronized mode
/home/nfs/ *.linux1.com(ro,sync) export /home/nfs directory for any
host within linux1.com domain
with a read only permission and
synchronized mode
/home/nfs/ linux2.com (rw, sync) export /home/nfs directory for
hostname linux2.com with read,
write permissions and
synchronized mode
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Author – A.Kishore/Sachin
http://appsdba.info
(b) Edit exports file
Open up text editor, for example, vi editor and edit /etc/exports file and add line
/home/nfs/ *(ro,sync) to export /home/nfs directory for any host with read only
permissions.
/home/nfs/ *(rw,sync)
We needto be sure that the directory you export by NFS exists. You can also create a file
inside the /home/nfs directory which will help us troubleshoot once we mount this file
system remotely.
$ touch /home/nfs/test_file
(c) Restart NFS daemon
Once we edited /etc/exports file, we need to restart NFS service to apply changes in the
/etc/exports file. Depending on our Linux distribution, the restarting of NFS may differ.
Debian users:
# /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart
Redhat users
# /etc/init.d/nfs restart
If you later decide to add more NFS exports to the /etc/exports file, you will need to either
restart NFS service or run command exportfs:
# exportfs -ra
3. Mount remote file system on client
First we need to create a mount point:
# mkdir /home/nfs_local
If we are sure that the NFS client and mount point are ready, we can run the mount
command to mount exported NFS remote file system:
# mount 192.168.114.231:/home/nfs /home/nfs_local
here we mounted /home/nfs from 192.168.114.231 to local machine.
In case if we need to specify a type of the filesystem we can do this as shown below:
# mount -t nfs 192.168.114.231:/home/nfs /home/nfs_local
We may get error message as shown below:
mount: mount to NFS server failed: timed out (retrying).
This may mean that our server supports higher versions of nfs and therefore we need to
pass one extra argument to our nfs client. In this example we use nfs version 3:
# mount -t nfs -o nfsvers=3 192.168.114.231:/home/nfs /home/nfs_local
3
Author – A.Kishore/Sachin
http://appsdba.info
Now we should be able to see that the file system is mounted.
Please Note: The mount command reports that the filesystem is mounted as "read and
write", although we can see that it provides a "read only" permission.
4. Configure automount
To make this mount point completely transparent to end users, we can automount the NFS
file system every time a user boots a PC, or we can also use PAM modules to mount once a
user logs in with a proper username and password. In this situation we need to edit
/etc/fstab to mount system automatically during a system boot. We can use vi editor and
create new line like this:
192.168.114.231:/home/nfs /home/nfs_local/ nfs defaults 0 0
in /etc/fstab or
# echo "192.168.114.231:/home/nfs /home/nfs_local/ nfs defaults 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
Restart NFS daemon with following commands:
$ /etc/init.d/nfs restart
$ /etc/init.d/nfslock restart
