Managing NFS and NIS, 2nd Edition

Chapter 14. NFS Diagnostic Tools

The previous chapter described diagnostic tools used to trace and resolve network and name service problems. In this chapter, we present tools for examining the configuration and performance of NFS, tools that monitor NFS network traffic, and tools that provide various statistics on the NFS client and server.

NFS administration tools

NFS administration problems can be of different types. You can experience problems mounting a filesystem from a server due to export misconfiguration, problems with file permissions, missing information, out-of-date information, or severe performance constraints. The output of the NFS tools described in this chapter will serve as input for the performance analysis and tuning procedures in Chapter 17.

Mount information is maintained in three files, as shown in Table 14-1.

Table 14-1. Mount information files

File	Host	Contents
/etc/dfs/sharetab	server	Currently exported filesystems
/etc/rmtab	server	host:directory name pairs for clients of this server
/etc/mnttab	client	Currently mounted filesystems

An NFS server is interested in the filesystems (and directories within those filesystem) it has exported and what clients have mounted filesystems from it. The /etc/dfs/sharetab file contains a list of the current exported filesystems and under normal conditions, it reflects the contents of the /etc/dfs/dfstab file line-for-line.

The existence of /etc/dfs/dfstab usually determines whether a machine becomes an ...