An overview of NFS

We have been used to NFSv4 being included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. RHEL 7 includes additional support for pNFS (Parallel NFS) with NFSv4.1. pNFS, providing security and performance enhancements, which allow more efficient connections to clients behind firewalls and Network Address Translation (NAT) routers.

Support for NFSv2 is no longer available, which is no great loss, as it did not support file sizes above 2 GB and was not as robust as version 3 and 4.

Using NFSv4, mounting and locking protocols are incorporated in a batteries included philosophy. This allows the use of just the one TCP port: 2049. However, with NFSv3, we have to use rpcbind and set static ports for additional services so that a firewall can be configured. This simplifies the firewall configuration, which you will see later, as access only to the TCP port 2049 is required.

Both the server and client tools are installed together from the nfs-utils package. This package includes tools for both the...