I copied somebody's NFS server/client setup verbatim and am having trouble making sense of what's going on with it. This is the /etc/exports:
/export *(rw,fsid=0,crossmnt,insecure,async,no_subtree_check,sec=krb5p:krb5i:krb5)
/export/home *(rw,insecure,async,no_subtree_check,sec=krb5p:krb5i:krb5)
Client machines use autofs to mount user home directories on demand. Here's auto.home:
* -fstype=nfs4,rw,soft,sec=krb5 192.168.0.2:/home/&
This works and works well. Still, exporting /export
seems unnecessary so I commented that line out of the server config. Now automounting fails on the clients.
Questions
- Why does
/export/home
require/export
to also be exported? - Do the security options for
/export
and/export/home
have to be the same? - Why does auto.home read
192.168.0.2:/home/&
instead of192.168.0.2:/export/home/&
? It doesn't seem like that should work at all.
Best Answer
You are using NFS version 4 (nfs4) which exports a single pseudo-filesystem rather than lots of separate filesystems.
This is specified on the NFS server in
/etc/exports
byfsid=0
, and in your case is called /export (although it could be called anything). That is why you cannot remove that line or comment it out.On the NFS client, this parent (in your case,
/export
) is seen as/
(the root of the exported filesystem) which is why the automounter uses/home
.