4. Setting up an NFS Client

4.1. Mounting remote directories

Before beginning, you should double-check to make sure your mount program is new enough (version 2.10m if you want to use Version 3 NFS), and that the client machine supports NFS mounting, though most standard distributions do. If you are using a 2.2 or later kernel with the /proc filesystem you can check the latter by reading the file /proc/filesystems and making sure there is a line containing nfs. If not, typing insmod nfs may make it magically appear if NFS has been compiled as a module; otherwise, you will need to build (or download) a kernel that has NFS support built in. In general, kernels that do not have NFS compiled in will give a very specific error when the mount command below is run.

To begin using machine as an NFS client, you will need the portmapper running on that machine, and to use NFS file locking, you will also need rpc.statd and rpc.lockd running on both the client and the server. Most recent distributions start those services by default at boot time; if yours doesn't, see Section 3.2 for information on how to start them up.

With portmap, lockd, and statd running, you should now be able to mount the remote directory from your server just the way you mount a local hard drive, with the mount command. Continuing our example from the previous section, suppose our server above is called master.foo.com,and we want to mount the /home directory on slave1.foo.com. Then, all we have to do, from the root prompt on slave1.foo.com, is type:

# mount master.foo.com:/home /mnt/home

and the directory /home on master will appear as the directory /mnt/home on slave1. (Note that this assumes we have created the directory /mnt/home as an empty mount point beforehand.)

If this does not work, see the Troubleshooting section (Section 7).

You can get rid of the file system by typing

# umount /mnt/home

just like you would for a local file system.

4.2. Getting NFS File Systems to Be Mounted at Boot Time

NFS file systems can be added to your /etc/fstab file the same way local file systems can, so that they mount when your system starts up. The only difference is that the file system type will be set to nfs and the dump and fsck order (the last two entries) will have to be set to zero. So for our example above, the entry in /etc/fstab would look like:

# device mountpoint fs-type options dump fsckorder ... master.foo.com:/home /mnt nfs rw 0 0 ...

See the man pages for fstab if you are unfamiliar with the syntax of this file. If you are using an automounter such as amd or autofs, the options in the corresponding fields of your mount listings should look very similar if not identical.

At this point you should have NFS working, though a few tweaks may still be necessary to get it to work well. You should also read Section 6 to be sure your setup is reasonably secure.

4.3. Mount options