Setup NFS server-client in Centos 7.

In this blog, I will answer some basic questions about NFS and explain how to setup NFS server-client.

What is NFS ?

Network File System(NFS) is a distributed file system protocol, to share the files and folders between the Linux/Unix systems.

Why is it used ?

To share files. Since mounting of filesystem is possible,
NFS-Client can access the files of NFS-Server as like the local files.

How to setup NFS ?

Since it's like a client-server model, we need to setup server and client individually.

Setup NFS-server

In this post, we are doing it in Centos, which uses yum as the package manager.
1.Installing nfs-utils

sudo su -
yum install nfs-utils

2.Choose the directory to share. If not present create one.

mkdir /var/nfs_share_dir

3.Add permissions and ownwership privilages to the shared directory.

chmod -R 755 /var/nfs_share_dir
chown nfsnobody:nfsnobody /var/nfs_share_dir

4.Start the nfs services.

systemctl enable rpcbind
systemctl enable nfs-server
systemctl enable nfs-lock
systemctl enable nfs-idmap
systemctl start rpcbind
systemctl start nfs-server
systemctl start nfs-lock
systemctl start nfs-idmap

5.Configuring the exports file for sharing.
Open the exports file and add these lines.

vi /etc/exports

Fill in the the file-shared path and clients details in /etc/exports.
192.168.48.101 - Client's IP

/var/nfs_share_dir    192.168.48.101(rw,sync,no_root_squash)

6.Restart the service

systemctl restart nfs-server

7.Only for Centos 7,NFS service override

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=nfs
firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=mountd
firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=rpc-bind
firewall-cmd --reload

Setup NFS-Client(s)

1.Installing nfs-utils

sudo su -
yum install nfs-utils

2.Create a mount point

mkdir -p /mnt/nfs/var/nfs_share_dir

3.Mounting the filesystem

mount -t nfs 192.168.48.100:/var/nfs_share_dir /mnt/nfs/var/nfs_share_dir

-t  type of filesystem
192.168.48.100 server's IP

4.Verify if mounted

$ df -kh

Filesystem                    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/centos-root         39G  1.1G   38G   3% /
devtmpfs                        488M     0  488M   0% /dev
tmpfs                          494M     0  494M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                            494M  6.7M  487M   2% /run
tmpfs                            494M     0  494M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/centos-home           19G   33M   19G   1% /home
/dev/sda1                         497M  126M  372M  26% /boot
192.168.48.100:/var/nfs_share_dir   39G  980M   38G   3% /mnt/nfs/var/nfs_share_dir

5.Mounting permanently.
Now if the client is rebooted, we need to remount again. So, to mount permanently,we need to configure /etc/fstab file.
Append this to /etc/fstab

192.168.48.100:/var/nfs_share_dir /mnt/nfs/var/nfs_share_dir nfs defaults 0 0

To verify, create a file in the Client-side, and open in server-side.

Client-side(192.168.48.101)

echo "Client Hello" >> /mnt/nfs/var/nfs_share_dir/testing.txt

Server-side(192.168.48.100)

$ cat /var/nfs_share_dir/testing.txt

Client Hello

Hurray! Now client is able to access the files of server.
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