| NFS allows you to mount disks on remote systems so that they appear as though they are local to your system. Similarly, NFS allows remote systems to mount your local disk so that it looks as though it is local to the remote system. Configuring NFS to achieve this functionality is simple. Here are the steps to go through in order to configure NFS: -
Start NFS. -
Specify whether your system will be an NFS Client, NFS Server, or both. -
Specify which of your local file systems can be mounted by remote systems. -
Specify the remote disks that you want to mount and view as if they were local to your system.
As with ARPA, you could enable other aspects to NFS, but again, I cover what I know to be the NFS functionality that nearly every UNIX installation uses. Because NFS may be setup on your system to meet the needs of many users, you may want to understand the terminology associated with NFS. The following are commonly used NFS terms: | Node | A computer system that is attached to or is part of a computer network. | | Client | A node that requests data or services from other nodes (servers). | | Server | A node that provides data or services to other nodes (clients) on the network. | | File System | A disk partition or logical volume. | | Export | Makes a file system available for mounting on remote nodes using NFS. | | Mount | Accesses a remote file system using NFS. | | Mount Point | The name of a directory on which the NFS file system is mounted. | | Import | Mounts a remote file system. |
Some of the specific configuration tasks and related files are different among UNIX variants. The following are some general tasks and examples related to configuring NFS. Your system administrator, of course, has to deal with the specifics of configuration on the UNIX variants. Your system must be an NFS client, NFS server, or both. There are also daemons which must be running to support NFS. Both of these tasks are performed somewhat differently among the UNIX variants. Your system then imports remote file systems to which you have local access and exports local file systems that are accessed by other systems. A remote file system that you are mounting locally has an entry similar to the one that follows in /etc/fstab, /etc/vfstab, /etc/filesystems, or whatever file is used to mount file systems: system2:/opt/app3 /opt/app3 nfs rw,suid 0 0 In this case, we are mounting /opt/app3 on system2 locally as /opt/ app3. This is an NFS mount with the permissions shown. You can use the showmount command to show all remote systems (clients) that have mounted a local file system. This command is supported on most UNIX variants. showmount is useful for determining the file systems that are most often mounted by clients with NFS. The output of showmount is particularly easy to read, because it lists the host name and the directory that was mounted by the client. You have the three following options to the showmount command: | -a | prints output in the format "name:directory" | | -d | lists all the local directories that have been remotely mounted by clients | | -e | prints a list of exported file systems |
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