Chapter 6. File Sharing with NFS
File sharing with Network File System (NFS) is the traditional way on Unix and Linux for remote hosts to be able to mount filesystems over a network and interact with them as if they were mounted locally. Although RHEL 7 supports both NFSv3 and NFSv4, there is no longer any support for NFSv2. The RHEL 7 client will default to NFSv4 and falls back to NFSv3 if a connection cannot be established. Using NFSv4 simplifies location of services behind a firewall with only the TCP port 2049
required for client access; however, we will demonstrate both the NFSv4 and v3 firewall configurations. During this chapter, the following topics will be covered:
- Overview of NFS
- Overview of the lab environment
- The NFS server configuration
- Using
exportfs
- Hosting NFSv4 behind a firewall
- Hosting NFSv3 behind a firewall
- The NFS client configuration
- Auto-mounting NFS with
autofs