Good morning folks!!

I'm trying to mount a NFS share over the internet however I keep receiving the following error:

Mount.nfs: mount system call failed.

Ports are NATted and local mounting works just fine.

What I'm planning to do is mount this location and then rsync an incremental backup to it.
This problem is not limmited to the setup I'm implementing it on. I've a test enviroment where I'm trying the same thing and it produces the same error.

The test enviroment consists of a NAS with NFS support and a virtual Ubuntu 10.04 server. It's very close to the setup I need to implement the backup sollution on. As i've said: on both setups I'm able to mount the NFS shares locally.

What am I missing here??

Thanks in advance!!

Kind regards,
Maarten

Check /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny on host. portmap, lockd, mountd, rquotad and statd should all be listed unless ALL:ALL is listed in hosts.allow.

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from what i understand nfs doesnt allow mounts thru routers (has to be on the local network).

look into sshfs.

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Doing NFS over the internet could be a problem, its really designed for LANs; also most firewalls would block those ports because of that.
Why not just do a straight rsync, preferably using ssh as transport.

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Hi all,

Thanks for the push in the right direction!!

As you stated NFS isn't the right choice here. Learned a lot about SSH, Rsync and sshfs. Great stuff!!

I've setup an Ubuntu server on our site and created an SSH key for our local server from the remote server. I'm now able to Rsync over ssh.

Thanks again!!

Kind Regards,

Maarten

Hi again people!!

Kinda solved the issue I started this thread for but still i'm experienmcing some difficulties with my RSync backup. Perhaps one of you might have a solution to the following problem:

I'm using a script to make a incremental, date stamped snapshot of a folder. or, at least I'm trying to...

from the script, the manual command would look kinda like this:

rsync -rvh -e ssh --delete --link-dest=server1.office.nl:/mnt/rsync/backup/2012-07-17 /backup server1.office.nl:/mnt/rsync/backup/2012-07-19 1> /var/log/backup/backup1.log

The error RSync returns is: --link-dest arg does not exist: server1.office.nl:/mnt/rsync/backup/2012-07-17

The sync works fine except for being incremental due to the error above. I'm able to mount the ../2012-07-17 folder with sshfs however when i change the --linkdest= path to the mount poit, the same error is produced... when I cd to the mount point I am able to see all the fiels and folders RSync should use..

I've googled for --link-dest problems, couldn't find one single site that mentioned this option.

Any1 got any idear??

For more information: My method is based on Andrew J. Nelson's guide on http://webgnuru.com/linux/rsync_incremental.php.

Thanks in advance!!

Kind Regards,

Maarten

Any1??

The --link-dest=<dir> must point to a local directory with the last backup. So the new backup can make hard links thereto. But you would like to make hard links on the destination site - and only there. Even if the syntax would allow it: I fear the sshfs mounted directory won’t provide the necessary information about the inodes to create hard links anywhere.

You can try to specify the plain directory like it’s called on the receiving side without any host address of sshfs in the way.

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Thnx Reuti for your reply!!

Ouch... That's a major set back. It seemed like the perfect way to do an incremental backup with date stamp however it appears this will only work as a local backup.

The link-dest=<dir> should point to the directory created by the backup of yesterday so that files that haven't changed are linked to the inode of the file in yesterdays backup.

Is there any other way we can get this to work??

Did you try to provide the plain path from the remote side for --link-dest=<dir> too (i.e. without the hostname) as this is already given for the target of the synchronization? No sshfs in the game.