From Wikipedia:
Network File System (NFS) is a network file system protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems in 1984, allowing a user on a client computer to access files over a network in a manner similar to how local storage is accessed.
So basically its a network share, it allows you to share files between remote computers
in the most easy and seamless way, once it was specifically for UNIX servers,
but today NFS is supported over MS servers as well.
Like everything else in Sysadmin life,
when its working its working well, and nobody hears about it,
but what to do when its not working?
Samba debugging for example is easier from that aspect since it has extensive logs for the sysadmin,
NFS doesn’t keep logs, and NFS issues doesn’t show up in the syslog/messages file as well.
But there are tools that allow you to get extensive information about the running NFS process,
shares, statistics, users connected etc :
Description |
Command |
| see what the machine is exporting | SunOS: # exportfs Solaris: # share |
| Print the list of shared file systems | showmount -e server_name |
| Print the list of all clients mounting a directory from the questioned server | showmount -a server_name |
| Print the directory and all the clients that are mounting it curretly – from within the nfs server | dfmounts |
| print the nfs netwrok statistics | client side: nfsstat -c server side: nfsstat -s |
| To see that nfsd is responding | rpcinfo -T udp crimson nfs |
| To see that mountd is responding | rpcinfo -T udp crimson mountd |
| To see that lockd is responding | rpcinfo -T udp crimson nlockmgr
rpcinfo -T udp crimson llockmgr |