Setup NFS Server and Client on RHEL 7 / CentOS 7

In this tutorial i will show you how to setup a NFS server  and client on Redhat 7 / CentOS 7

The same steps can be used in Fedora based systems also instead of yum you have to use dnf.

NFS stands for Network File System which allows end systems to mount file systems over a network and interact with those as they are mounted locally

Redhat 7 added support to the NFS version 4.1 , which has a lot of performance and security

NFS Server Setup

For setting up the nfs server we need a CentOS 7 or redhat 7 , i am using CentOS 7 as NFS server and RHEL 7 as client

Step 1 : Install the nfs packages

yum -y install nfs-utils libnfsidmap

Step 2 : Start the NFS services and enable the services to work even after reboots

• systemctl start rpcbind
• systemctl enable rpcbind
• systemctl start nfs-server
• systemctl enable nfs-server
• systemctl start nfs-lock
• systemctl start nfs-idmap

Step 3 : Create a folder and share it over network

Create a folder in your server and provide the necessary permissions , i created a folder under "/" partition and providing 777 to it

mkdir /myshare

chmod 777 /myshare

Now we need to make a entry in /etc/exports file to make the share available on the client systems

/myshare 192.168.211.140(rw,sync,no_root_squash)

where

• /myshare - is the shared folder to the clients
• 19.168.211.140 - NFS server ip
• rw - Allows to read and write on the shared dir
• ro - Allows to read the contents in the shared dir
• sync - allows to sync
• no_root_squash - Any file request made by user root on the client machine is treated as made by user nfsnobody in the server

Once the export file is modified we need to export the share dir listed in exports file using the below

exportfs -a

Step 4 : Configure Firewall

we need to add the below rules on nfs server, so that clients can access the shared dir

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone public --add-service mountd

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone public --add-service nfs

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone public --add-service rpc-bind

firewall-cmd --reload

NFS Client Setup

Step 1 : Install the nfs pacakges on client

yum -y install nfs-utils libnfsidmap

Step 2 : Start the necessary services

• systemctl start rpcbind
• systemctl enable rpcbind
• systemctl start nfs-server
• systemctl enable nfs-server
• systemctl start nfs-lock
• systemctl start nfs-idmap

Step 3 : Check the shared NFS dir by using showmount

showmount -e serverip

Step 3 : Mount the shared dir on the client

mount -t nfs {NFS server ip}:(shared dir) (Mountpoint)

eg :

mount -t nfs 192.168.211.140:/myshare /mnt

Step 4 : Verify it

For checking use df -h  or mount command

Automounting NFS share

Upto whatever we did is a temporary , if you  need it to permanent then the entry need to be in fstab

serverip:/myshare /mnt nfs defaults 0 0