Setting Up An NFS Server And Client On Mandriva 2010.1 Spring

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
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Last edited 09/24/2010

This guide explains how to set up an NFS server and an NFS client on Mandriva 2010.1 Spring. NFS stands for Network File System; through NFS, a client can access (read, write) a remote share on an NFS server as if it was on the local hard disk.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

I'm using two Mandriva systems here:

• NFS Server: server.example.com, IP address: 192.168.0.100
• NFS Client: client.example.com, IP address: 192.168.0.101

2 Installing NFS

server:

On the NFS server we run:

urpmi nfs-utils

Then we create the system startup links for the NFS server and start it:

chkconfig --levels 235 nfs-server on
/etc/init.d/nfs-server restart

client:

On the client we can install NFS as follows (this is actually the same as on the server):

urpmi nfs-utils

3 Exporting Directories On The Server

server:

I'd like to make the directories /home and /var/nfs accessible to the client; therefore we must "export" them on the server.

When a client accesses an NFS share, this normally happens as the user nobody. Usually the /home directory isn't owned by nobody (and I don't recommend to change its ownership to nobody!), and because we want to read and write on /home, we tell NFS that accesses should be made as root (if our /home share was read-only, this wouldn't be necessary). The /var/nfs directory doesn't exist, so we can create it and change its ownership to nobody and nogroup:

mkdir /var/nfs
chown nobody:nogroup /var/nfs

Now we must modify /etc/exports where we "export" our NFS shares. We specify /home and /var/nfs as NFS shares and tell NFS to make accesses to /home as root (to learn more about /etc/exports, its format and available options, take a look at

man 5 exports

)

vi /etc/exports

# /etc/exports: the access control list for filesystems which may be exported
#               to NFS clients.  See exports(5).
/home           192.168.0.101(rw,sync,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check)
/var/nfs        192.168.0.101(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)

(The no_root_squash option makes that /home will be accessed as root.)

Whenever we modify /etc/exports, we must run

exportfs -a

afterwards to make the changes effective.