Setting Up An NFS Server And Client On OpenSUSE 11.3

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Last edited 09/14/2010

This guide explains how to set up an NFS server and an NFS client on OpenSUSE 11.3. NFS stands for Network File System; through NFS, a client can access (read, write) a remote share on an NFS server as if it was on the local hard disk.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

 

1 Preliminary Note

I'm using two OpenSUSE systems here:

NFS Server: server.example.com, IP address: 192.168.0.100 NFS Client: client.example.com, IP address: 192.168.0.101

 

2 Installing NFSserver:

On the NFS server we run:

yast2 -i nfs-kernel-server

Then we create the system startup links for the NFS server and start it:

chkconfig --add nfsserver
/etc/init.d/nfsserver start

client:

On the client we can install NFS as follows:

yast2 -i nfs-client

 

3 Exporting Directories On The Serverserver:

I'd like to make the directories /home and /var/nfs accessible to the client; therefore we must "export" them on the server.

When a client accesses an NFS share, this normally happens as the user nobody. Usually the /home directory isn't owned by nobody (and I don't recommend to change its ownership to nobody!), and because we want to read and write on /home, we tell NFS that accesses should be made as root (if our /home share was read-only, this wouldn't be necessary). The /var/nfs directory doesn't exist, so we can create it and change its ownership to nobody and nogroup:

mkdir /var/nfs
chown nobody:nogroup /var/nfs

Now we must modify /etc/exports where we "export" our NFS shares. We specify /home and /var/nfs as NFS shares and tell NFS to make accesses to /home as root (to learn more about /etc/exports, its format and available options, take a look at

man 5 exports

)

vi /etc/exports

# See the exports(5) manpage for a description of the syntax of this file.# This file contains a list of all directories that are to be exported to# other computers via NFS (Network File System).# This file used by rpc.nfsd and rpc.mountd. See their manpages for details# on how make changes in this file effective./home 192.168.0.101(rw,sync,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check)/var/nfs 192.168.0.101(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)

(The no_root_squash option makes that /home will be accessed as root.)

Whenever we modify /etc/exports, we must run

exportfs -a

afterwards to make the changes effective.

 

4 Mounting The NFS Shares On The Clientclient:

First we create the directories where we want to mount the NFS shares, e.g.:

mkdir -p /mnt/nfs/home
mkdir -p /mnt/nfs/var/nfs

Afterwards, we can mount them as follows:

mount 192.168.0.100:/home /mnt/nfs/home
mount 192.168.0.100:/var/nfs /mnt/nfs/var/nfs

You should now see the two NFS shares in the outputs of

df -h

client: