File sharing through NFS

When systems need to share access to the same data set, they commonly use databases when the data is structured or a file server share when the data is unstructured. One of the most popular file-sharing capabilities in Linux is the use of the Network File System (NFS) service.

However, by default, NFS is not capable of handling extended attributes (needed for keeping track of the SELinux contexts). A number of possible implementations can be followed to enable NFS support on SELinux systems without great difficulty.

Setting up basic NFS

Start with the basic NFS setup to host the content. For instance, we might want to host the content under the /export location, with two subdirectories: instance1 and instance2. These subdirectories could then be mounted on web-server-hosting systems.

In the /etc/exports file, put the file system to export through NFS together with the client list (a sort of coarse-grained access control list) and the options:

# cat /etc/exports 
/export...