How to share a directory over a network using NFS

Posted by Sylvester Rac on Sunday, October 14. 2018

NFS or Network File System is a quick and easy way to share files between Linux hosts on a network. Client machines are able to mount specific directories on a server machine and access the files as if they are on the client's local filesystem.

Configuring an NFS share is as easy as installing a package and editing a config file. For the steps below I'm using a Debian client and a Ubuntu based server.

Configuring the server

Begin by installing the nfs-kernel-server package if it isn't already installed:

sudo apt-get install nfs-kernel-server

Next create a directory on the server for sharing:

sudo mkdir -p /home/user/public

The next step is important to allow any user access. We change the owner to nobody in no group:

sudo chown nobody:nogroup /home/user/public

sudo chmod 777 /home/user/public

Now edit the config file:

sudo vi /etc/exports

Add a line to the end as shown. The IP address provided specifies the permitted clients, in this case 192.168.1.0/24 allows the entire 192.168.1.X subnet access.

# /etc/exports: the access control list for filesystems which may be exported
#        to NFS clients.  See exports(5).
#
# Example for NFSv2 and NFSv3:
# /srv/homes       hostname1(rw,sync,no_subtree_check) hostname2(ro,sync,no_subtree_check)
#
# Example for NFSv4:
# /srv/nfs4        gss/krb5i(rw,sync,fsid=0,crossmnt,no_subtree_check)
# /srv/nfs4/homes  gss/krb5i(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)
#
/home/user/public    192.168.1.0/24(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)

Finally, export the shares and restart the NFS server:

sudo exportfs -a

sudo systemctl restart nfs-kernel-server

Mounting the NFS share on the client

Install the nfs-common package if it isn't already installed:

sudo apt-get install nfs-common

To mount the share on the server at IP address 192.168.1.199:

sudo mount 192.168.1.199:/home/user/public /mnt/mount_dir

The directory /mnt/mount_dir can be anywhere on the local filesystem. Reading or writing to this location will result in a read or write to the server.

Remember to unmount when you're done: