Setting Up An NFS Server And Client On CentOS 5.5

This guide explains how to set up an NFS server and an NFS client 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.

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 and start 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-utils nfs-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 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; 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 a Permission 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 appeared to be owned by the user and group nobody, but on the server they were owned by the (nonexistant) user and group with the ID 65534; so I changed ownership of /var/nfs to the user/group 65534 on the server and changed permissions of /var/nfs back to 755, and voilà, the client was allowed to write to /var/nfs:
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mkdir /var/nfs
chown 65534:65534 /var/nfs
chmod 755 /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

/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.

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