As you can see, we are exporting the directory /mnt/test to *.freeos.com, including foo2.freeos.com. On the other hand, we don't want foo2 to access the sub-directory 'sub'. We just mark the directory as noaccess. Now foo2 will be able to mount /mnt/test from the server and the directory sub will be visible, but if a client was to enter the directory and do a 'ls' there, none of the directory entries will be visible.

There are many more options available but we have given the most commonly used ones here.

Also remember that each change to the contents of the file exports requires that the list of exported directories be refreshed.

Mounting NFS exports

NFS shares can be mounted as you would mount other filesystems - the only difference being that the source will include the address or the hostname of the server.

mount 192.168.1.1:/mnt/test /mnt/nfsmount

So, we are just specifying the server to mount from and the directory exported by the server, separated by a colon. The last bit is the mount point for the exported directory.

This was a quick view of NFS and how to get it up and running. We have found this to be an indispensable tool and it has certainly proven to be very effective on our network.