Setting up an nfs server and client on centos 5.5

Setting Up An NFS Server And Client On CentOS 5.5


Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme
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Last edited 09/16/2010

This guide explains how to set up an NFS server and an NFSclient on CentOS 5.5. 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 anyguarantee that this will work for you!


1 Preliminary Note

I'm using two CentOS 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:

yum install nfs-utils nfs-utils-lib

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

chkconfig --levels 235 nfs on
/etc/init.d/nfs start

client:

On the client we can install NFS as follows (this is actually the same as on the server):

yum install nfs-utilsnfs-utils-lib


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 aclient 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 wantto 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 itand change its ownership; in my tests the user and group nobody both had the ID 99 on both my CentOS test systems (server and client); when I tried to write to /var/nfs from the NFS client, I got aPermission denied error, so I did a chmod 777 /var/nfs so that everyone could write to that directory; writing to /var/nfs from the client worked then, and on the client the files written to /var/nfs...