Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition

Mounting an NFS Volume

The mounting of NFS volumes closely resembles regular file systems. Invoke mount using the following syntax:^[81]

# mount -t nfs 
               nfs_volume local_dir options

nfs_volume is given as remote_host:remote_dir. Since this notation is unique to NFS filesystems, you can leave out the -t nfs option.

There are a number of additional options that you can specify to mount upon mounting an NFS volume. These may be given either following the -o switch on the command line or in the options field of the /etc/fstab entry for the volume. In both cases, multiple options are separated by commas and must not contain any whitespace characters. Options specified on the command line always override those given in the fstab file.

Here is a sample entry from /etc/fstab:

# volume              mount point       type  options
news:/var/spool/news  /var/spool/news   nfs   timeo=14,intr

This volume can then be mounted using this command:

# mount news:/var/spool/news

In the absence of an fstab entry, NFS mount invocations look a lot uglier. For instance, suppose you mount your users’ home directories from a machine named moonshot, which uses a default block size of 4 K for read/write operations. You might increase the block size to 8 K to obtain better performance by issuing the command:

# mount moonshot:/home /home -o rsize=8192,wsize=8192

The list of all valid options is described in its entirety in the nfs(5) manual page. The following is a partial list of options you would probably want to use:

rsize=n ...