NFS Clients

OpenBSD’s NFS client doesn’t need any daemons or configuration. Just mount the remote filesystem. Here, I mount my home directory from my server treble on /mnt:

# mount treble:/home/mwlucas /mnt

When mounting remote filesystems over NFS, enter the hostname or IP address, a colon, and the directory. Because I have the same UID on both the client and server, I can access, alter, remove, and add files in /mnt exactly as if I were dealing with files on a local filesystem.

Verify your mount with df(1) or mount(8).

$ df -h
Filesystem             Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/sd0a             1005M    266M    689M    28%    /
…
treble:/home/mwlucas  26.9G   21.5M   25.5G     0%    /mnt

The NFS-mounted directory shows up like any other mount point.

To mount an NFS share automatically at boot, or just record it for future convenience, you may use an /etc/fstab entry. If your system might not have DNS available to it at boot time, use an IP address for the NFS server. The following example specifies two fstab entries: one using a hostname and one using an IP address:

treble:/home/mwlucas /mnt nfs,noauto rw 0 0
192.0.2.88:/usr/ports /usr/ports nfs,noauto ro 0 0

Give all NFS partitions dump and fsck numbers of 0. Do not run fsck or dump on an NFS mount, as those programs require raw disk access that NFS doesn’t provide.

Use any other mount options you like. The OpenBSD folks recommend using noexec, nodev, and nosuid “when applicable.” I recommend noauto on NFS partitions that aren’t required for normal server operation, so that an unavailable NFS server does not hang your machine’s boot process.

NFS performance depends a great deal on your hardware, your local network, the clients and servers involved, the phase of the moon, and any number of other factors. If you’re not happy with your NFS performance, read mount_nfs(8) and experiment with using TCP or UDP, the read and write sizes, and perhaps the timeout. If you need a complicated NFS environment, you should definitely invest some time in learning more about NFS.