Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition

The NFS Daemons

If you want to provide NFS service to other hosts, you have to run the rpc.nfsd and rpc.mountd daemons on your machine. As RPC-based programs, they are not managed by inetd, but are started up at boot time and register themselves with the portmapper; therefore, you have to make sure to start them only after rpc.portmap is running. Usually, you’d use something like the following example in one of your network boot scripts:

if [ -x /usr/sbin/rpc.mountd ]; then
        /usr/sbin/rpc.mountd; echo -n " mountd"
fi
if [ -x /usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd ]; then
        /usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd; echo -n " nfsd"
fi

The ownership information of the files an NFS daemon provides to its clients usually contains only numerical user and group IDs. If both client and server associate the same user and group names with these numerical IDs, they are said to their share uid/gid space. For example, this is the case when you use NIS to distribute the passwd information to all hosts on your LAN.

On some occasions, however, the IDs on different hosts do not match. Rather than updating the uids and gids of the client to match those of the server, you can use the rpc.ugidd mapping daemon to work around the disparity. Using the map_daemon option explained a little later, you can tell rpc.nfsd to map the server’s uid/gid space to the client’s uid/gid space with the aid of the rpc.ugidd on the client. Unfortunately, the rpc.ugidd daemon isn’t supplied on all modern Linux distributions, so if you need it and yours doesn’t ...