Setting Up An NFS Server And Client On OpenSUSE 11.3

Setting Up An NFS Server And Client On OpenSUSE 11.3

Version 1.0

Author: Falko Timme




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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 NFS

server:
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 Server

server:
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 Client

client:
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:~ # df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/sda2 12G 1.3G 9.8G 12% /

devtmpfs 245M 132K 245M 1% /dev

tmpfs 247M 4.0K 247M 1% /dev/shm

/dev/sda3 18G 172M 17G 2% /srv

192.168.0.100:/home 12G 1.5G 9.6G 14% /mnt/nfs/home

192.168.0.100:/var/nfs

12G 1.5G 9.6G 14% /mnt/nfs/var/nfs

client:~ #
and

mount
client:~ # mount

/dev/sda2 on / type ext4 (rw,acl,user_xattr)

proc on /proc type proc (rw)

sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)

debugfs on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)

devtmpfs on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755)

tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,mode=1777)

devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,mode=0620,gid=5)

/dev/sda3 on /srv type ext4 (rw,acl,user_xattr)

securityfs on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)

none on /proc/fs/vmblock/mountPoint type vmblock (rw)

192.168.0.100:/home on /mnt/nfs/home type nfs (rw,addr=192.168.0.100)

192.168.0.100:/var/nfs on /mnt/nfs/var/nfs type nfs (rw,addr=192.168.0.100)

client:~ #

5 Testing

On the client, you can now try to create test files on the NFS shares:

client:
touch /mnt/nfs/home/test.txt

touch /mnt/nfs/var/nfs/test.txt
Now go to the server and check if you can see both test files:

server:
ls -l /home/
server:~ # ls -l /home/

total 4

drwxr-xr-x 6 administrator users 4096 Jul 19 17:26 administrator

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Sep 14 20:47 test.txt

server:~ #
ls -l /var/nfs

server:~ # ls -l /var/nfs

total 0

-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nogroup 0 Sep 14 20:47 test.txt

server:~ #
(Please note the different ownerships of the test files: the
/home NFS share gets accessed as root, therefore /home/test.txt is owned by root; the
/var/nfs share gets accessed as
nobody, therefore /var/nfs/test.txt is owned by
nobody.)

6 Mounting NFS Shares At Boot Time

Instead of mounting the NFS shares manually on the client, you could modify
/etc/fstab so that the NFS shares get mounted automatically when the client boots.

client:
Open /etc/fstab and append the following lines:

vi /etc/fstab

[...] 192.168.0.100:/home /mnt/nfs/home nfs rw,sync,hard,intr 0 0 192.168.0.100:/var/nfs /mnt/nfs/var/nfs nfs rw,sync,hard,intr 0 0

Instead of rw,sync,hard,intr you can use different mount options. To learn more about available options, take a look at

man nfs
To test if your modified /etc/fstab is working, reboot the client:

reboot
After the reboot, you should find the two NFS shares in the outputs of

df -h
client:~ # df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/sda2 12G 1.3G 9.8G 12% /

devtmpfs 245M 132K 245M 1% /dev

tmpfs 247M 4.0K 247M 1% /dev/shm

/dev/sda3 18G 172M 17G 2% /srv

192.168.0.100:/home 12G 1.5G 9.6G 14% /mnt/nfs/home

192.168.0.100:/var/nfs

12G 1.5G 9.6G 14% /mnt/nfs/var/nfs

client:~ #
and

mount
client:~ # mount

/dev/sda2 on / type ext4 (rw,acl,user_xattr)

proc on /proc type proc (rw)

sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)

debugfs on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)

devtmpfs on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755)

tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,mode=1777)

devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,mode=0620,gid=5)

/dev/sda3 on /srv type ext4 (rw,acl,user_xattr)

securityfs on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)

rpc_pipefs on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)

192.168.0.100:/home on /mnt/nfs/home type nfs (rw,sync,hard,intr,addr=192.168.0.100)

192.168.0.100:/var/nfs on /mnt/nfs/var/nfs type nfs (rw,sync,hard,intr,addr=192.168.0.100)

none on /proc/fs/vmblock/mountPoint type vmblock (rw)

client:~ #

7 Links

Linux NFS: http://nfs.sourceforge.net/ OpenSUSE: http://www.opensuse.org/


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From: Anonymous at:
2010-09-20 04:42:11
Reply

Most of it is the same on Ubuntu / Debian just exchange "yast2 -i" for "apt-get install". You should also be able to skip "chkconfig --add nfsserver". It's been awhile since I last installed NFS but that should be all the changes you need.

From: Caldavien at:
2010-09-16 15:56:36
Reply

I liked this walkthrough but would love to see the same this for a ubuntu server/client set up. Hopefully I can carry over some of this to help with my current ubuntu setup.

From: Juan at: 2011-01-24 21:40:20
Reply

Thanks bud, great article! I had to replace yast2 for zypper, but otherwise great!

From: scarter at: 2011-02-10 06:02:03
Reply

One thing, though -- if you're absent-minded, as I am, you may spend half a day trying to figure out why the mount operation sin step 4 times out even though the two machines can ping each other, before you remember to change your firewall settings to allow
NIFS access on the ports it needs.

From: at: 2011-02-19 05:02:16
Reply

Recently I discovered autofs and it's ability to automount nfs shares when the user tries to access it.

Install autofs and in /etc/auto.master uncomment "#/net -hosts"

The system will now automatically access any system with it's name in the hosts file

For example '$ls /net/falko' will mount 192.168.0.100 right away (assuming /etc/hosts contains the line '192.168.0.100 falko').

I prefer that over boot time mounts in fstab.

From: Anonymous at:
2014-01-23 15:52:05
Reply

Very, very nice. Thanks for your time

From: yasser at: 2014-08-28 03:02:21
Reply

Hi,
Please i need help, this is a copy-paste from the terminal, i am using OpenSuse

client1:~ # yast2 -i nfs-kernel-server

client1:~ # chkconfig --add nfsserver

nfsserver: unknown service

Could someone tell me why do i get this, and how to fix it?

Thank you

From: Sreeraj at: 2014-12-29 09:57:15
Reply

Hi my NFS server and client both are suse 11.When i tried to mount from client i am getting error.

mount -t nfs4 10.11.1.5:/usr/sap/trans/ /usr/sap/transnfs/

mount.nfs4: No such device