Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition

Chapter 14. The Network File System

The Network File System (NFS) is probably the most prominent network service using RPC. It allows you to access files on remote hosts in exactly the same way you would access local files. A mixture of kernel support and user-space daemons on the client side, along with an NFS server on the server side, makes this possible. This file access is completely transparent to the client and works across a variety of server and host architectures.

NFS offers a number of useful features:

• Data accessed by all users can be kept on a central host, with clients mounting this directory at boot time. For example, you can keep all user accounts on one host and have all hosts on your network mount /home from that host. If NFS is installed beside NIS, users can log into any system and still work on one set of files.

• Data consuming large amounts of disk space can be kept on a single host. For example, all files and programs relating to LaTeX and METAFONT can be kept and maintained in one place.

• Administrative data can be kept on a single host. There is no need to use rcp to install the same stupid file on 20 different machines.

It’s not too hard to set up basic NFS operation on both the client and server; this chapter tells you how.

Linux NFS is largely the work of Rick Sladkey, who wrote the NFS kernel code and large parts of the NFS server.^[79] The latter is derived from the unfsd user space NFS server, originally written by Mark Shand, and the hnfs Harris NFS server, ...