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How to Mount an NFS Share Drive⚓

Summary⚓

This article will discuss mounting an NFS share drive, as well as configuring the OS to automatically mount it at startup.

Installing NFS Client Packages⚓

The package needed to allow Linux to locate NFS shares is called cifs-utils and can be installed through a number of different ways that are outlined below depending on OS:

  • Installing NFS client on Ubuntu and Debian:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install nfs-common
  • Installing NFS client on CentOS and Fedora:
sudo yum install nfs-utils

Installing NFS client on Manjaro and Arch:

# Located in the AUR
$ sudo pacman -Syu cifs-utils

Manually Mounting an NFS File System⚓

Use the steps below to manually mount a remote NFS share on your Linux system:

sudo mkdir /mnt/backups

Mount point is a directory on the local machine where the NFS share is to be mounted.

  • Mount the NFS share by running the following command as root or user with sudo privileges:
sudo mount -t nfs 192.168.1.6:/volume1/backups /mnt/backups

Where 192.168.1.6 is the IP address of the NFS server, /volume1 is the volume, /backup is the directory that the server is exporting and /mnt/backups is the local mount point.

On success, no output is produced.

NOTE: When you are manually mounting the share, the NFS share mount does not persist after a reboot.

Automatically Mounting an NFS File System⚓

Generally, you will want to mount the remote NFS directory automatically when the system boots.

The /etc/fstab file contains a list of entries that define where how and what filesystem will be mounted on system startup.

To automatically mount an NFS share when your Linux system starts up add a line to the /etc/fstab file. The line must include the hostname or the IP address of the NFS server, the exported directory, and the mount point on the local machine

Use the following procedure to automatically mount an NFS share on Linux systems:

Open the /etc/fstab file with your text editor:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Add the following line to the file:

# <file system>               <dir>       <type>   <options>   <dump>    <pass>
192.168.1.6:/volume1/backups /mnt/backups  nfs      defaults    0       0

Where 192.168.1.6 is the IP address of the NFS server, /volume1 is the volume, /backup is the directory that the server is exporting and /mnt/backups is the local mount point.

Run the mount command in one of the following forms to mount the NFS share:

mount /mnt/backups
mount 192.168.1.6:/volume1/backups

At this point, once the system is rebooted, the file system should automatically be mounted at startup.

Troubleshooting⚓

If there are any errors when trying to mount the drive, make sure that the NFS client is running. I had a number of strange errors when mounting the backup folder and found the NFS client was stopped. To start the NFS client, open a Terminal and type the following:

sudo systemctl start nfs-utils.service

Reference⚓

https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-mount-an-nfs-share-in-linux/