A guide to setup an NFS server

Setting up a NFS share shouldn’t take more than 2 minutes, 1 minute to setup the server (aka the machine who provide the service) and another minute to setup the client (aka the machine who consume the service). So let’s dig right in as we have about 2 minutes of work to do.

Setup the server

In debian/ubuntu, you’d need to install the right nfs server package:

Then let’s configure our sharesfrom /etc/exports. For example:

/tmp/     *(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)
/home/    192.168.68.101/24(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)

Each separate line is a separate share and each share has 3 pieces of configuration:

1. the folder we want to serve which is the path of our share
2. the ip range who is allowed access to the share.
3. all sort of options, there’s tons of them and it’s all documented

Once we’ve configured things the way we want it, we need to restart everything:

Client Configuration

Before we can mount everything up, we first need to install the nfs driver.

My NFS server is available from 192.168.68.108. Let’s make a sanity check to make sure everything is actually running fine:

Next stop is to install the nfs client:

and finally, let’s mount our share on the filesystem:

That’s it you’re done and unless your have a terrible internet, we should be way under the 2 minute mark!

If you want to go a step further, you can automatically mount your your nfs share in fstab. In my case it would look something like this:

Patching common errors

Depending on your setup you might see a couple very common errors. Let’s fix those:

common issue 1: you don’t have the nfs mount driver installed:

the fix is to install the missing nfs driver like this:

common issue 2: Operation not permitted in lxd:

the fix can be 2 folds, first let’s try the simple one:

If that’s not enough, you might need to change the lxd config like this: