1 Preliminary Note
I have fresh installed CentOS 7 server, on which I am going to install the NFS server. My CentOS server have hostname server1.example.com and IP as 192.168.0.100
If you don’t have a CentOS server installed yet, use this tutorial for the basic operating system installation. Additionally to the server, we need a CentOS 7 client machine, this can be either a server or desktop system. In my case, I will use a CentOS 7 desktop with hostname client1.example.com and IP 192.168.0.101 as a client. I will run all the commands in this tutorial as the root user.
2 At NFS server end
As the first step, we will install these packages on the CentOS server with yum:
yum install nfs-utils
Now create the directory that will be shared by NFS:
mkdir /var/nfsshare
Change the permissions of the folder as follows:
chmod -R 755 /var/nfsshare chown nfsnobody:nfsnobody /var/nfsshare
We use /var/nfsshare as a shared folder, if we use another drive such as the /home directory, then the permission changes will cause a massive permissions problem and ruin the whole hierarchy. So in case, we want to share the /home directory then permissions must not be changed.
Next, we need to start the services and enable them to be started at boot time.
systemctl enable rpcbind systemctl enable nfs-server systemctl enable nfs-lock systemctl enable nfs-idmap systemctl start rpcbind systemctl start nfs-server systemctl start nfs-lock systemctl start nfs-idmap
Now we will share the NFS directory over the network a follows:
nano /etc/exports
We will make two sharing points /home and /var/nfsshare. Edit the exports file as follows:
/var/nfsshare 192.168.0.101(rw,sync,no_root_squash,no_all_squash) /home 192.168.0.101(rw,sync,no_root_squash,no_all_squash)
Note 192.168.0.101 is the IP of the client machine, if you wish that any other client should access it you need to add it IP wise otherwise you can add “*” instead of IP for all IP access.
Condition is that it must be pingable at both ends.
Finally, start the NFS service:
systemctl restart nfs-server
Again we need to add the NFS service override in CentOS 7 firewall-cmd public zone service as:
firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=nfs firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=mountd firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=rpc-bind firewall-cmd --reload
Note: If it will be not done, then it will give error for Connection Time Out at client side.
Now we are ready with the NFS server part.
3 NFS client end
In my case, I have a CentOS 7 desktop as client. Other CentOS versions will also work the same way. Install the nfs-utild package as follows:
yum install nfs-utils
Now create the NFS directory mount points:
mkdir -p /mnt/nfs/home mkdir -p /mnt/nfs/var/nfsshare
Next, we will mount the NFS shared home directory in the client machine as shown below:
mount -t nfs 192.168.0.100:/home /mnt/nfs/home/
It will mount /home of NFS server. Next we will mount the /var/nfsshare directory:
mount -t nfs 192.168.0.100:/var/nfsshare /mnt/nfs/var/nfsshare/
Now we are connected with the NFS share, we will crosscheck it as follows:
df -kh
[root@client1 ~]# df -kh Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/centos-root 39G 1.1G 38G 3% / devtmpfs 488M 0 488M 0% /dev tmpfs 494M 0 494M 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 494M 6.7M 487M 2% /run tmpfs 494M 0 494M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/mapper/centos-home 19G 33M 19G 1% /home /dev/sda1 497M 126M 372M 26% /boot 192.168.0.100:/var/nfsshare 39G 980M 38G 3% /mnt/nfs/var/nfsshare 192.168.0.100:/home 19G 33M 19G 1% /mnt/nfs/home [root@client1 ~]#
So we are connected with the NFS share.
Now we will check the read/write permissions in the shared path. At client enter the command:
touch /mnt/nfs/var/nfsshare/test_nfs
So we successfully configured an NFS-share.
4 Permanent NFS mounting
We have to re-mount the NFS share at the client after every reboot. Here are the steps to mount it permanently by adding the NFS-share in /etc/fstab file of client machine:
nano /etc/fstab
Add the entries like this:
[...] 192.168.0.100:/home /mnt/nfs/home nfs defaults 0 0 192.168.0.100:/var/nfsshare /mnt/nfs/var/nfsshare nfs defaults 0 0
Note 192.168.0.100 is the server NFS-share IP address, it will vary in your case.
This will make the permanent mount of the NFS-share. Now you can reboot the machine and mount points will be permanent even after the reboot.
Cheers, now we have a successfully configured NFS-server over CentOS 7 🙂
