Set up NFS Shares between Linux hosts

networking

Network File Share or NFS allows sharing directories between Linux hosts on the same network, similar to Samba though it has better performance with small and medium-sized files comparatively. Here's a quick guide on setting up an NFS share between Linux hosts.

Table of Contents

  1. Set up the NFS server
  2. Set up the NFS client
  3. Add the NFS share to fstab
  4. References

Set up the NFS server

Install the NFS server package and all dependencies on the Linux host that will be the NFS server, sharing one of it’s directories over the network:

# Debian & Ubuntu
sudo apt install nfs-kernel-server -y

# Fedora & CentOS
sudo yum -y install nfs-utils

We will share the media folder from the home directory of user ross. Create/edit a config file at /etc/exports and add these settings:

/home/ross/media *(rw,no_subtree_check)

Explanation:

  • /home/ross/media is the directory to be shared by the NFS server. (Obviously, set this to whatever you want.)
  • * makes the share accessible by ALL clients on the network, you can also specify an IP address or multiple IPs separated by space after the parenthesis. (See below for example.)
  • rw enables clients to both read and write. Without this NFS defaults to read-only, so be sure to specify it.
  • no_subtree_check makes NFS not check if each subdirectory is accessible to the user which may slightly improve reliability, but slightly reduce security. See here for details.

You can alternately make the share accessible only to one or a few specific IPs, and specify different rules for each, for example:

/home/ross/media 192.168.1.201(rw) 192.168.1.202(rw) 192.168.1.203

Using the above settings, only 3 specific clients are allowed, the first two clients can read and write, but the third is read-only. (Since we did not specify rw.)

After editing /etc/exports and saving the file, use the following commands to apply the new settings and restart the NFS server:

sudo exportfs -a
sudo systemctl restart nfs-server

Set up the NFS client

Install the NFS client package and all dependencies on a Linux host you want to allow to access the NFS server share:

Information

If you’re using Fedora or CentOS, you don’t need to install a separate package, since both server and client packages are combined within nfs-utils.

# Debian & Ubuntu only
sudo apt install nfs-common -y

To access the NFS share, it has to be mounted to a local directory. We’ll mount it to /mnt/share. Create the directory you will mount the NFS share to:

cd /mnt
mkdir share

Now mount the share:

sudo mount -t nfs 192.168.1.100:/home/ross/share /mnt/share

mount -t nfs specifies the directory being mounted is an NFS share from another host, 192.168.1.100:/home/ross/share is the IP address of the server (can also use hostname) and the path of the shared directory, and /mnt/share is the local directory to mount the network share to.

Add the NFS share to fstab

To have Linux auto-mount the share at boot, edit the fstab file with sudo nano /etc/fstab and add the following to the bottom:

192.168.1.100:/home/ross/media /mnt/share nfs defaults 0 0