Dmitry Dovidenko’s Blog

NFS Shares on CentOS

Many situations require a “share” of some sort where data is accessible on several machines from a common source. This way data does not have to be duplicated every time and can be accessed over network. The two popular methods are NFS and Samba. For this tutorial we will try to use NFS. Setting up NFS shares on CentOS is fairly easy and mounting them is even simpler!

I. The server that holds the content to be shared:

First you will want to install the needed apps and libraries:

yum install -y nfs-utils nfs-utils-lib nfs-utils-lib-devel

Then you should edit /etc/exports and setup your shares. The format is “/path/to/share ip.ad.dre.ss(options,options) ip.ad.dre.ss(options,options) etc…” You should end up with a file like this:

/home/something/content1/ 192.168.1.101(async,no_subtree_check,rw) 192.168.1.102(async,no_subtree_check,rw)
/home/something/content2/ 192.168.1.101(async,no_subtree_check,rw) 192.168.1.102(async,no_subtree_check,rw)
/home/something/content3/ 192.168.1.101(async,no_subtree_check,rw) 192.168.1.102(async,no_subtree_check,rw)

Then you will want to edit /etc/hosts.allow and add something like:

portmap: 192.168.1.101, 192.168.1.102

Then start services:

/etc/init.d/portmap start
/etc/init.d/nfs start

Then make sure the services start on boot:

chkconfig nfs on
chkconfig portmap on

II. The servers that are pulling the content over NFS:

This is the easy part. You just have to mount the share via /etc/fstab. The format is “nfshost:/nfs/share /path/to/mount/to nfs option,option,option 0 0″. So go ahead and open /etc/fstab and add something like this:

192.168.1.1:/home/something/content1/    /home/mydomain/public_html/mycontent1    nfs    rw,hard,intr    0 0

Then you just need to run:

mount -a

Which should mount everything in fstab. If there are errors re-read the tutorial and make sure they are nfs related errors, not other errors in your fstab! Google is your friend!