Open SUSE® 11.0 and SUSE® Linux® Enterprise Server Bible

Chapter 22. Working with NFS

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Mounting NFS filesystems across the network

• NFS mount options

• Setting up an NFS server

• Solving problems with NFS

• NFS security

The Network File System (NFS) was pioneered by Sun and has become a standard in the world of Unix. With NFS, clients can mount filesystems across the network that are being offered by NFS servers and can work with them as if they were filesystems mounted from local disks. NFS is a simple and widely used method of sharing files across the network.

When a group of clients is accessing the same filesystems across NFS, it is often convenient for those clients to use a distributed authentication mechanism so that user and group accounts and other information are shared between the clients. The standard way of doing this is with the Network Information System (NIS). The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) provides an alternative and more sophisticated way of doing this. NIS and LDAP are discussed in Chapter 25.

In this chapter, we look at how to mount NFS filesystems on client systems and how to set up an NFS server to make networked file systems available (known as exporting them).

Mounting NFS Filesystems

A machine that is offering directories to share across the network by NFS is an NFS server. A machine that mounts one of these shares for its own use is an NFS client.

First, we look at the client side of things; we will assume that an NFS server is available and look at how to mount a share that an NFS server is offering. ...