thanks heaps - made the job very easy. couple of possible improvements:

 - it would be good to have an explanation of the options used (no_root_squash?, rsize?, wsize?) and why you chose them. I will look into these but would have been handy to have them here.

- while on chosen preferences, is there a reason i'm not aware of for the 'async' approach? the commented examples in the export file all use 'sync' and i would think that would be better to prevent race conditions when giving write permissions to another machine(s)

- restarting  nfs on the server generated:

"exportfs: /etc/exports [1]: Neither 'subtree_check' or 'no_subtree_check' specified for export "192.168.1.50:/mydir". Assuming default behaviour ('no_subtree_check')"

I'll look further into it to see how this effects operations but i set it to subtree_check for now as i'd like as much checking of everything as possible if multiple pc's are reading and writing to a single dir.

thanks again for the quick-start