Hi there,

I have two machines under the same subnet, running CentOS 5.7. I would like one to run as a server, with the other being able to access a drive on the 'server'. Further to this, I would also like to store the profiles of the 'client' machine on the 'server' machine, thus mounting the network drives on booting. How can I go about accomplishing this? I've Googled extensively, but I can't find any information on the subject without a heavy slant to Windows/Linux interaction, and would appreciate a straight forward answer on where to look and possibly what to do. Thanks .

Liam

You just want NFS to achieve that. Nothing fancy, just an entry in /etc/exports.

if this scales you'll be wanting centralized user accounts, I'd say openldap is the best way to do that.

Thanks for the recommendations, and the possible way forward with user accounts. I'll update my progress at the end of the day, add a few datails about what worked for me.

Not much progress, I spent most of my day doing actual work (god forbid!). I did, however, try the following:

1. Added the line '/raid *(rw,sync)' to /etc/exports on the server. The path /'raid corresponds to the directory I intend to share (which is a raid volume).
2. Restarted the nfs service on the server using '/etc/init.d/nfs restart'.
3. Added the directory /raid on the client computer.
4. Attempted to mount the nfs volume using 'mount -t nfs4 192.168.10.31:/raid /raid'

It is at this point I received 'mount.nfs4: Operation not permitted'. The mount command was issued as root, so I assume it's not a permissions problem. My diagnostic process was as follows:

1. I checked that NFS4 is enabled (using 'rcpinfo -p'), and it is on port 2049 for both TCP and UDP.
2. I've checked that the rpc.idmap daemon is running on both the server and the client (using 'ps -ef | grep idmap'), which it is.
3. The firewalls are disabled (We have a hardware firewall), and I confirmed this using 'iptables -L' and seeing that the default input, output and forward policy is "ACCEPT".
4. I ran 'showmount -e 192.168.10.31' (where that ip address corresponds to the server), and received the following:

If I have understood correctly, this means that /raid is being shared, and can be mounted by anyone. Except, apparently, my client computer!

Any suggestion as to how to proceed?

your server side exports config is for conventional nfs, I would suggest just sticking with that, and not worrying about nfs4 for now.

Ah, thanks! Seems to be working now, a silly mistake on my part.

Something I didn't include above was automatically starting the NFS service. This was done through the 'ntsysv' utility (started from the console).

Now, I think I'll give openldap a try. Should I start a new thread, or continue in this one? Seems I should start a new one, given that this thread has served it's purpose, and gives a pretty good little summary of setting up an nfs share.

yep, new thread ftw.