Set up NFS server on Fedora Core 5, OS X NFS Client

Jon Todd — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 04:10:23 +0000

I recently bought a 750GB hard drive and installed it in my linux box running Fedora Core 5. Since I run my iTunes on my powerbook and have this big hard drive in my server I needed a way to add network access to the disk from OS X. I chose to setup the linux box as a NFS server and then use the built in network connector in Finder to connect to my drive.

How to setup NFS server on Fedora Core 5

With a very standard install of FC5 you should have all the nessesary deamons to run NFS. First you will need to edit the /etc/exports file. I know there is a way to do this with the GUI but a far better way to learn is to do it by hand. Before actually editing the file I’d do a man exports or check it out here as I am only going to include what I did when there are many other features that you may choose to use.
su vi /etc/exports add line of the form:
/path/to/shared/dir hostname/ip(options)
so that it looks like: /mnt/tmp 192.168.0.4(rw,insecure,sync)

This tells the nfs server to allow 192.168.0.4 to both read and write to /mnt/tmp on the NFS server.

Now get it running

This will update NFS with changes made to /etc/exports:
exportfs -ra
This will restart NFS /etc/init.d/nfs restart

Connecting with OS X

Simply go to finder select Go->Connect To Server… and enter NFS address in the form:
nfs://ip/dir
In our example that would look like:
nfs://192.168.0.4/mnt/tmp

Hit connect and you should be on!

Auto connect on boot

This page has a great description of all the options for connecting automatically in os x.

Troubleshooting

It actually took me a few days to get this working and I ran into a bunch of problems that no other site really made clear so I’m going to try to help.

Check permissions of mounted directory. If using (rw) make sure that the directory is both readable and writable. chmod 777 /mnt/tmp
For more security, use same UID’s for NFS server and client. I had to change my uid on my server to 501 to match my uid on my laptop. NFS will write the files using the uid of the client so if that user doesn’t exist on the server then you will see id numbers instead of usernames in directory listings.
Use option insecure (rw,insecure,sync). This piece of info was what held me up for a few days. Apparently when connecting from a mac you need to specify this option.
Finder says “cannont connect username or password is bad.” This is BULL! usernames and passwords are not used by NFS. There is something wrong with your /ect/export file
Make sure the options immediately follow the hostname/ip like 192.168.0.4(rw) not 192.168.0.4 (rw)

Final notes

I may be wrong in saying that NFS will only work on the mac if you do things this way so please correct me if I’m wrong. I just know what it took to make it work and hope this saves you some time. Feel free to post comments with issues and I’ll try to help.

Jon Todd » Servers

Set up NFS server on Fedora Core 5, OS X NFS Client