Q I just installed Fedora on a used PC. Since I already had Linux installed on another system, I planned on mounting the /var/spool/up2date folder from the first one on the second so I won't have to download update files twice But after looking at the Red Hat manual, man page and the HOWTO page, I'm still unsuccessful. Here's what I did. On the server I put in the /etc/exports file the line
/var/spool/up2date 192.168.1.12 (ro,sync,no_root_squash)
and in the /etc/hosts.allow file
all:192.168.1.12
On the client side I put the following in /etc/fstab:
192.168.1.1 1:/var/spool/up2date /server/var nfs soft 0 0
I tried with the directory /server then /server/var to create without luck. The error message that I had was, 'Failed server is down'. I tried again by disabling the firewall on the server and that time I had an RPC timeout error. I did notice that on the server, rpc.mountd and portmap are running but not rpc.nfsd. Could you show me how to properly configure NFS on both machines so I could share the folder, and how to properly configure the firewall?
A Your /etc/exports file is correct, so you should be able to do
/etc/rc.d/init.d/nfs start
If that does not work, verify that you have the packages pertaining to being a Network File System server installed. You can review /var/log/messages to establish exactly why the NFS server failed to start, though with Fedora it should just work out of the box. You can verify which RPC services are running with rcpinfo -p, which will need to list nfsd before you can mount it on the remote system. To answer your question about the firewall, if the system is on your internal network, it will be safe to leave the firewall down, assuming you trust everything within your network. For a system that's outwardly accessible, you will have a separate outside interface which you can limit connectivity through, and open the inside one. Often it can be difficult to permit NFS through a firewall, but by using rpcinfo you can get a good idea of what ports need to be opened for NFS to function. I would really recommend against opening NFS on the internet as it is an unencrypted protocol and transports your data in plain text.