Autofs Nfs

Linux Mint comes pre-installed with all components to mount Windows File sharing (SMB/CIFS) but does not support NFS out of the box. The following post will explain how to enable Linux Mint to mount a NFS share. Additionally the NFS share shall be mounted automatically.

A third option for mounting an NFS share is the use of the autofs service. 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. This file is a slightly modified version of the file auto.smb which usually comes as part of the autofs package. You need to modify the line defining the mountopts above and change user to the name of your personal account name. Now you have to give autofs the credentials needed to access shares on your network. To do this create a file called. Autofs is a program that automatically mounts specified directories on an on-demand basis. It is based on a kernel module for high efficiency, and can manage both local directories and network shares. These automatic mount points are mounted only when they are accessed, and unmounted after a certain period of inactivity. This on-demand behavior saves bandwidth and results in better performance. Incompatibility between CentOS Linux and macOS NFS/AutoFS versions. Solution: In order to change NFS and AutoFS from V4 to V3, perform the following: Note: Be aware of the following: Manual entry of values may be required if not present in configuration files. Verify that workstations are reachable by using the 'ping' command. Autofs with NFS shares Greetings everyone, I have been away from Linux for several years and am now back to running pure.nix in my home again. My NFS share is located on a FreeNAS server containing the following /etc/exports.

Linux Mint does not come pre-installed with all utilities necessary for mounting NFS shares. The missing package 'nfs-common' need to be installed with the following command.

With the missing components installed, Linux Mint is able to mount an NFS share without any problems. The following commands will mount the NFS share. The first command will create the directory the Share will be mounted to while the second command will mount the NFS share.

When un-mounting, the mount directory needs to be removed manually as well.

Automatically mount the NFS share

To automate these manual steps of mounting the share as well as creating the mount directory, a utility named 'autofs(5)' can be used. This utility is also not installed per default. To install it, run the following command.

Autofs installs a few configuration files. Among them is the auto.master(5)' configuration file at /etc/auto.master' which needs to be changed. This configuration file contains the master-map for autofs. Open the /etc/auto.master configuration file in your preferred file editor.

Add the following line of configuration to the file. The first part ('/media/username/nfs') defines the mountpoint for the map while the second is the map-file which in this case is '/etc/auto.nfs'. The filename of the map-file can be chosen and will be created later. The rest of this line are options. The '–timeout=30' defines the time (in seconds) until the directory is unmounted after not using it. The '–ghost' option tells autofs to create 'ghost' directories (empty directories) of all the mount points listed in the map-file even if they are not mounted.

Do not end the mointpoint with a slash as it will change the behaviour. With a slash at the end, the directory '/media/username/nfs' will be the mount point of the nfs share not '/media/username/nfs/sharename' as it is supposed to be.

Now the map-file can be created. Create the file /etc/auto.nfs and open it in your preferred file editor.

The file may contain one or more lines in the format shown below. Each line may represent a different nfs share to mount. The first part of the line is the mountpoint-key and will be added to the mountpoint of the master-map. In this example, the share below will be available via '/media/username/nfs/sharename'. The second part on this line is the mount-options which are used to mount the share. The third part is the location containing the 'hostname' and the 'path' to the share separated by colon ':'.

With the share configured in the map-file, autofs can be restarted. Webcam world view 5 1 2. Restarting a service in Linux Mint can be done using the following command.

Dynamically connect via GUI

To mount NFS shares dynamically without configuring them is also possible. The idea is to enter the URL to the NFS share directly into the file explorer and get connected similar to mounting samba (CIFS) shares. This can also be achieved using the autofs utility.

With the share configured in the map-file, autofs can be restarted. Webcam world view 5 1 2. Restarting a service in Linux Mint can be done using the following command.

Dynamically connect via GUI

To mount NFS shares dynamically without configuring them is also possible. The idea is to enter the URL to the NFS share directly into the file explorer and get connected similar to mounting samba (CIFS) shares. This can also be achieved using the autofs utility.

Add the following line to the master-map file at '/etc/auto.master' which will enable a the mountpoint '/net/' for this purpose.

The first part in this line is again the mountpoint while the second part '-hosts' is a built-in map. This built-in map allows to mount shares dynamically by specifying the host and share like this.

Autofs will automatically connect to the server (in this example 'hostname-or-IP') and mount the share 'sharename'. Only entering '/net/hostname-or-IP' will show all available shares on the server allowing you to pick one of them. This works from the GUI file explorer as well as from the command line.

Read more of my posts on my blog at https://blog.tinned-software.net/.

Note (2016-07-03): This article still might be interesting if you want tolearn about autofs on Linux, but if you want to share files with a local VM Irecommend readingthis updated article instead.

There is this really cool feature on Unix systems called autofs. It is reallycrazy, really magical, and really convenient. In a previous life I had tomaintain what is likely the world's most complicated hierarchical autofs setup(distributed in an hierarchical manner across thousands of NetApp filers), so Ilearned a lot about autofs and how it works. In this post though, I'm just goingto explain what it is, why you'd want to use it, and how to set it up.

Autofs Nfs Ubuntu

I'm explicitly going to explain the workflow for using autofs with a local VM,not how to use it in production.

Let's say you're in the habit of doing dev work on a VM. A lot of people do thisbecause they are on OS X or Windows and need to do dev work on Linux. I do itbecause I'm Fedora and need to do dev work on Debian, so I have a VM that runsDebian. You can set up autofs on OS X too. However, I don't use OS X so I can'texplain how to set it up. I believe it works exactly the same way, and it Ithink it's even be installed by default, so I think you can follow this guidewith OS X and it might be even easier. But no guarantees.

Now, there are a lot of ways to set it up so that you can access files on yourVM. A lot of people use sshfs because it'ssuper easy to set up. There's nothing wrong per se with sshfs, but it works viaFUSE and therefore iskind of weird and slow. The slowness is what really bothers me personally.

There's this amazing things calledNFS that has been availableon Unix systems since the 1980s and is specifically designed to be an efficientPOSIX network filesystem. It has a ton of features, you can do tons offine-grained control over your NFS mounts, and the Linux kernel has both nativesupport for being an NFS client and server. That's right, there's an NFSserver in the Linux kernel (there's also a userspace one). So if you're tryingto access remote files on a Linux system for regular work, I highly recommendusing NFS instead of sshfs. It has way higher performance and has beenspecifically designed from day one for Unix systems remotely accessingfilesystems on other Unix systems.

Autofs Nfs-server

Setting up the NFS Server on Debian

There's one package you need to install, nfs-kernel-server. To install it:

Now you're going to want to set this up to actually run and be enabled bydefault. On a Debian Jessie installation you'll do:

If you're using an older version of Debian (or Ubuntu) you'll have to futz withthe various legacy systems for managing system startup service e.g.by usingUpstart or update-rc.d.

Rhel Autofs

Great, now you have an NFS server running. You need to set it up so that otherpeople can actually access things using it. You do this by modifying the file/etc/exports. I have a single line in mine:

This makes it possible for any remote system on the 192.168.124.0/24 subnetpossible to mount /home/evan with read/write permissions on my server withoutany authentication. Normally this would be incredibly insecure, but the defaultway that Linux virtualization works with libvirt is that 192.168.124.0/24 isreserved for local virtual machines, so I'm OK with it. In my case I know thatonly localhost can access this machine, so in my case it's only insecure insofaras if I give someone else my laptop they can access my VM.

Please check your network settings to verify that remote hosts on your networkcan't mount your NFS export since if they can you've exposed your NFS mount toyour local network. Your firewall may already disable NFS exports by default, ifnot just change the host mask. There are also ways to set up NFS authentication,but you shouldn't need to do that just to use a VM and that topic is outside thescope of this blog post.

Now reload nfs-kernel-server so it knows about the new export:

Update: It waspointed out to methat if you're accessing the VM from OS X you have to use high ports forautomounted NFS, meaning that in the /etc/exports file on the guest VM you'llneed to add 'insecure' as an export option.

Setting up the NFS Client on Debian/Fedora

On client you'll need the autofs package. Parallels desktop 14 1 02. On Fedora that will be:

and on Debian/Ubuntu it will be How to watch tv on pc.

I think it's auto-installed on OS X?

Again, I'm going to assume you're on a recent Linux distro (Fedora, or a modernDebian/Ubuntu) that has systemd, and then you'll do:

How To Configure Autofs

Before we proceed, I recommend that you record the IP of your VM and put it in/etc/hosts. There's some way to set up static networking with libvirt hosts,but I haven't bothered to figure it out yet, so I just logged into the machineand recorded its IP (which is the same every time it boots). On my system, in my/etc/hosts file I added a line like:

So now I can use the hostname d8 as an alias for 192.168.124.252. You canverify this using ssh or ping.

Laptop search engine uk. Roblox merchandise shop. Due to some magic that I don't understand, on modern NFS systems there's a wayto query a remote server and ask what NFS exports it knows about. You can querythese servers using the showmount command. So in my case I now see:

This confirms that for the host alias d8 I added that the host is actuallyexporting NFS mounts in the way I expect. If you don't have a showmountcommand you may need to install a package called nfs-utils to get it.

Actually Using Autofs

Now here's where it gets magical.

When you do any filesystem operation (e.g. change directory, open a file, list adirectory, etc.) that would normally fail with ENOENT, the kernel checks ifthat file should have been available via autofs. If it is, it will mount thefilesystem using autofs and then proceed with the operation as usual.

This is really crazy if you think about it. Literally every filesystem relatedsystem call has logic in it that understands this autofs thing and cantransparently mount remote media (which doesn't just have to be NFS, this usedto be how Linux distros auto-mounted CD-ROMs) and then proceeds with theoperation. And this is all invisible ot the user.

There's a ton of ways to configure autofs, but here's the easiest way. Your/etc/auto.master file will likely contain a file like this already (if not,add it):

This means that there is a magical autofs directory called /net, which isn't areal directory. And if you go to /net//mnt/point then it willautomatically NFS mount /mnt/point from on your behalf.

If you want to be really fancy you can set /etc/auto.masster to use a timeout,e.g.:

Bigasoft audio converter 5 4 0 7. So here's what I do. I added a symlink like this:

So now I have an 'empty' directory called ~/d8. When I start up my computer, Ialso start up my local VM. Once the VM boots up, if I enter the ~/d8 directoryor access data in it, it's automatically mounted! And if I don't use thedirectory, or I'm not running the VM, then it's just a broken symlink.

This solves a major problem with the conventional way you would use NFS with aVM. Normally what you would do is you'd have a line in /etc/fstab that has thedetails of the NFS mount. However, if you set it up to be automatically mounted,you have a problem where your machine will try to mount the VM before the VM isfinished booting. You can use the user option in your /etc/fstab optionsline which lets you subsequently mount the VM NFS server without being root, butthen you have to manually invoke the mount command once you know the VM isstarted.

By using autofs, you don't ever need to type the mount command, and you don'teven need to change /etc/fstab. I recommend editing /etc/hosts because it'sconvenient, but you don't need to do that either. I could have just as easilyused /net/192.168.124.252/home/evan and not created a hosts entry.