[Techtalk] Mounting an NFS share

[Anne Wainwright]

Hi, Sunbird,

Thank you for offers of help, succeeded unaided but not without some hassle and overtime.

We (the Royal 'we', meaning I) got it going. The 'how' follows with the background for those not familiar with NFS (the prewindows pre-Samba Network File System). I am not the expert here, just stitching together some basic information that I have researched to glue the problem and solution together. This is how we finally succeeded.

For information of all, there are two machines, I was using NFS to get certain files off my laptop prior to installing new system on same (hence named Pandora - a box with a lid for those not classically inclined) onto desktop m/c (Athene, patroness of weaving, helper of heroes) prior to installing a new system.

So small network of two linux machines. Got network going, 2 machines pinging merrily away at one another so no doubts on network viability.

Debian system. Mike Hunger's Debian Bible (old 1st edition) says that NFS requires netbase, nfs-common and nfs-kernel-server packages. I update Pandora to latest editions of these and accept the multitude of necessary changes. I set up a simple NFS share in /etc/exports on Pandora thus

/home/anotheranne (rw)

I reboot to be sure (years of windows training spring into action here) and note with satisfaction that all the daemons like rpc-mountd, nfsd (like 6 instances) portmap and rpc.statd (instead of rpc.nfsd it seems) that he mentions are all listed processes in the system monitor window. So ok,  Pandora should serve up the files.

Onto Athene. The NFS share is 'mounted' in just the same way as any other storage device. It is not necessary that it be included in /etc/fstab unless you want it done automagically on every boot. The command can be issued as a sudo in Ubuntu. 

Athene $ sudo mount server:/remote/share /mount/point

The mount point must exist. thus from Athene having made a directory /Pandora :

Athene $ sudo mount pandora:/home/anotheranne /home/anotheranne/Pandora

Then, hey-presto, the files are mounted to /home/anotheranne/Pandora
similarly:

Athene $ sudo umount /home/anotheranne/Pandora

I note that if an entry is included in fstab then the file type is to be listed as 'nfs' and the format of the file system is of no concern as I feared.

<break for tea>

Now it didn't go as easy as this, and I could not get the share mounted across the network previously so I do not know what the problem was. As set now it works reliably. When I rebooted today with the intention of reexamining the situation it just went.

The share survives the breaking of the network and is reestablished when the connection is reestablished due to the UDF protocol.

I haven't succeeded in getting it going the other way, ie accessing a share on Athene from Pandora, but that is another matter.

Starting Athene is now problematical, see seperate post.

Anne


On Sat, 27 Dec 2008 13:35:44 -0800 (PST)
Sunbird wrote:

|> Hi Anne,
|> 
|> Sorry for top post but yahoo isn't quoting your stuff so am taking easy way.
|> 
|> You say the nfs share isn't showing as expected.  What does it tell you in particular?
|>