I thought I would pass on my problems with NFS because it was not obvious to me from the manual and from the internet what the problem was.

My server which is running SUSE 9.1 has two physical disks mounted under /home as /home/backup and /home/source.

Logically I assumed that you could just export /home to other computers on the network. However, this did not work and resulted in either an empty directory for /home/backup and /home/source or if you tried mounting these directly a permission denied error.

I had to export /home, /home/source and /home/backup and mount all 3 for these to be accessable on the client machine.

Is this correct or am I just a newbie who cannot work Linux?

You need to add some lines to /etc/exports (or your distro's equivalent)

here's an example line:

/folder/to/export 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0(rw)

To export a directory to all addresses (192.168.1.1-192.168.1.254) in read-write mode.

To mount the exported filesystem, you have to do a
mount -t nfs host:/folder/to/export /local/path

Hope this helps!