Learning RHEL Networking

The NFS server configuration

To configure the NFS server, we choose which directories we want to share. The terminology used in NFS to share a directory is to export the directory; therefore, shared directories are known as exports.

To permanently export a directory, we add the configuration to the /etc/exports file. This file exists, but will be empty on a new system. The nfs-server service will read this file on startup to determine which directories should be available to the network client. If /etc/exports is changed, reloading the nfs-server service will force the service to reread the file, as shown in the following command line:

$ sudo systemctl reload nfs-server

To display the current exports on the server, we can use the exportfs or