Perfect NFS On An Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) Server System (amd64)

NFS, Network File System, is a file sharing protocol in a UNIX network. It is the de facto UNIX standard. It is strongly associated with UNIX systems, although it can be used on any platform such as Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems. This tutorial shows how to set up an NFS server and client on Ubuntu 8.04 (AMD64).

NFS Advantages:

Local workstations use less disk space because commonly used data can be stored on a single machine and still remain accessible to others over the network.
There is no need for users to have separate home directories on every network machine. Home directories could be set up on the NFS server and made available throughout the network.
Storage devices such as floppy disks, CDROM drives, and Zip® drives can be used by other machines on the network. This may reduce the number of removable media drives throughout the network.

Install NFS Server:

apt-get install nfs-kernel-server nfs-common portmap

NFS Server Configuration:

NFS exports from a server are controlled by the file /etc/exports. Each line begins with the absolute path of a directory to be exported, followed by a space-seperated list of allowed clients.

You need to edit the exports file using the following command:

vi /etc/exports

Here are some quick examples of what you could add to your /etc/exports - For Full Read Write Permissions allowing any computer from 192.168.1.1 through 192.168.1.255:

/home 192.168.1.201/24(rw,no_root_squash,async)

Where 192.168.1.201 is the IP of the NFS server.

A client can be specified either by name or IP address. Wildcards (*) are allowed in names, as are netmasks (e.g. /24) following IP addresses, but should usually be avoided for security reasons.

A client specification may be followed by a set of options, in parenthesis. It is important not to leave any space between the last client specification character and the opening parenthesis, since spaces are intrepreted as client seperators.

Now you need to restart NFS server using the following command:

/etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart

You can validate the exported filesystem by the command:

exportfs

If you make any changes to /etc/exports on a running NFS server, you can make these changes effective by issuing the command:

exportfs -a

Install NFS client support in Ubuntu:

apt-get install portmap nfs-common

This will install all the required packages for the nfs client.

Mounting manually:

Example to mount server.mydomain.com:/home to /home. In this example server.mydomain.com is the name of the server containing the nfs share, and /home is the name of the share on the nfs server.

The mount point /home must first exist on the client machine.

Create files directory using the following command:

mkdir /home

You need to mount the share using the following command:

mount server.mydomain.com:/home /home

Now you may need to restart services using the following command:

/etc/init.d/portmap restart
/etc/init.d/nfs-common restart

Mounting at boot time using /etc/fstab:

If you want to mount using the fstab file (by the way - in big infrastructures it’s always better to use the fstab file):

vi /etc/fstab

In this example my /etc/fstab was like this:

server.mydomain.com:/home /home nfs rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14,intr

Change server.mydomain.com:/home, and /home to match your server name, share name, and the name of the mount point you created.

Firewall Ports for NFS:

If you have a firewall you need to make sure that the ports 32771, 111 and 2049 are open.

Testing Your Configuration:

Use the following command in terminal to test:

mount /home

The mount point /home will be mounted from the server to the client and using the df command the output should look like:

192.168.1.201:/home     7672288    810144   6475488  12% /home

That’s all... Thanks.