How To : Setup and use NFS Server

April 17, 2019 Linux

NFS Server

Install required services for it to run as NFS server :

yum install nfs-utils libnfsidmap -y
systemctl enable rpcbind
systemctl enable nfs-server
systemctl start rpcbind
systemctl start nfs-server
systemctl start rpc-statd
systemctl start nfs-idmapd

Create a directory where we want to set as the NFS Directory, in this case we call it “shared_home”. Afterwards, change the ownership and permission of the new directory :

mkdir /shared_home
chown -R nfsnobody. shared_home/
chmod 777 /shared_home/

Edit file /etc/exports to allow which server that will use the NFS directory.

vi /etc/exports

E.g. content of the file where we allow server 10.62.8.32 to access the NFS directory :

/shared_home    10.62.8.32(rw,sync,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check)

Run below command to apply the new configuration

exportfs -a

Client Server

Client server for example, a Web Server that will mount the NFS directory to local directory for example “/home”, before we can connect to the NFS server, we need to install few services :

yum -y install nfs-utils libnfsidmap -y
systemctl enable rpcbind
systemctl start rpcbind

Verify the directory that the NFS server is sharing

showmount -e 10.62.8.34

Mount the NFS directory

mount -t nfs -vvvv  -o nfsvers=3  10.62.8.34:/shared_home /home

To apply the NFS directory permanently even after reboot, we need to add the new mount in /etc/fstab

vi /etc/fstab

Insert content as below

10.62.8.34:/shared_home                   /home                   nfs     defaults,vers=3,nolock        0 0

To verify, run command

df -h

If you can see the new mounted directory, it is successful, example as below

[root@web-2 ~]# df -h
 Filesystem               Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
 /dev/mapper/centos-root   17G  1.6G   16G   9% /
 devtmpfs                 908M     0  908M   0% /dev
 tmpfs                    920M     0  920M   0% /dev/shm
 tmpfs                    920M  8.8M  911M   1% /run
 tmpfs                    920M     0  920M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
 /dev/sda1               1014M  189M  826M  19% /boot
 nfs-1:/shared_home        17G  1.6G   16G   9% /home
 tmpfs                    184M     0  184M   0% /run/user/0

You are free to perform reboot test, to verify /etc/fstab is working properly

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