22.3 Specifying the Folders to be Shared

Now that NFS is running and the firewall has been configured, we need to specify which parts of the Ubuntu file system may be accessed by remote Linux or UNIX systems. These settings can be declared in the /etc/exports file, which will need to be modified to export the directories for remote access via NFS. The syntax for an export line in this file is as follows:

<export> <host1>(<options>) <host2>(<options>)...

In the above line, <export> is replaced by the directory to be exported, <host1> is the name or IP address of the system to which access is being granted and <options> represents the restrictions that are to be imposed on that access (read only, read write etc). Multiple host and options entries may be placed on the same line if required. For example, the following line grants read only permission to the /datafiles directory to a host with the IP address of 192.168.2.38:

/datafiles...