An alternate way to mount an NFS share from another machine is to add
a line to your /etc/fstab file. The line must
state the hostname of the NFS server, the directory on the server
being exported, and the directory on the local machine where you want
to mount the filesystem. You must be root to modify the
/etc/fstab file.
The general syntax for the line in /etc/fstab is
as follows:
server:/usr/local/pub /pub nfs rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14,intr |
The mount point /pub must exist on your machine.
After adding this line to /etc/fstab, you can
type the command mount /pub at a shell prompt,
and the mount point /pub will be mounted from the
server.
A third option for mounting an NFS share is the use of autofs. Autofs
uses the automount daemon to manage your mount points by only mounting
them dynamically when they are accessed.
Autofs consults the master map configuration file
/etc/auto.master to determine which mount points
are defined. It then starts an automount process with the appropriate
parameters for each mount point. Each line in the master map defines a
mount point and a separate map file that defines the filesystems to
be mounted under this mount point. For example, the
/etc/auto.mnt file might define mount points in
the /mnt directory; this relationship would be
defined in the /etc/auto.master file.
Each entry in auto.master has three fields. The
first field is the mount point. The second field is the location of
the map file, and the third field is optional. The third field can
contain information such as a timeout value.
For example, to mount the directory /project52 on
the remote machine penguin.host.net at the mount point
/mnt/myproject on your machine, add the following
line to auto.master:
/mnt /etc/auto.mnt --timeout 60 |
Add the following line to /etc/auto.mnt:
myproject -rw,soft,intr,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 penguin.host.net:/project52 |
The first field in /etc/auto.mnt is the name of
the /mnt subdirectory. This directory is created
dynamically by automount. It should not actually exist on the
client machine. The second field contains mount options such as rw
for read and write access. The third field is the location of the NFS
export including the hostname and directory.
 | The directory /mnt must exist on the local
filesystem. There should be no subdirectories to
/mnt on the local filesystem.
|
Autofs is a service. To start the service, at a shell prompt, type the
following commands:
To view the active mount points, type the following command at a shell
prompt:
If you modify the /etc/auto.master configuration
file while autofs is running, you must tell the automount daemon(s)
to reload by typing the following command at a shell prompt:
To learn how to configure autofs to start at boot time, refer to Chapter 8 for information on managing services.
