OpenBSD NFS Server

Setting up an OpenBSD NFS Server - NFS stands for Network File System. It is software that is included with every OpenBSD installation. It is a way to use a computer as a file server. A computer on the network that shares files with any number of other computers on the network. It can be very handy for sharing files. I use one for my music server, which is great. I can mount my music collection from the NFS server to my ~/Music directory on any computer on my network. In this tutorial I will show you everything you need to know to get an NFS server up and running.

Configure the exports file

Let's start with the exports file. The export file will contain the information necessary for our NFS server to export folders to other computers on the network. Say, for example we want to share the directory music with any computer on the network and we want to make the folder readable and writeable. The following should be in the /etc/exports file.

/home/user/music -network=10.0.0 -mask=255.255.255.0

This tells the server to export the folder /home/user/music with read and write permissions to any other computer on the network.

Enable and start NFS daemons

Next, we want to start and enable the necessary daemons on the NFS server, which include portmap, mountd and nfsd. This will start up the NFS server and have them load automatically at boot.

# rcctl enable portmap mountd nfsd
# rcctl start portmap mountd nfsd

Identify exports on NFS server

Now that we have started up our NFS server, we can open a terminal on another computer in the network and type

# showmount -e 10.0.0.88 (or whatever your servers IP address is)

It should show something like this

Export list for 10.0.0.88:
/home/user/music 10.0.0.0

Mount remote export directories

Finally, we should mount the exported folder in another computers directory structure. In the example below we will mount the exported folders contents in ~/Music. If you want to mount it read only, just add -o ro.

# mount -t nfs 10.0.0.88:/home/user/music ~/Music

If you make any new changes to the export file, simply reload mountd.

# rcctl reload mountd

Automatically mount remote export directories

Another option you may or may not want to use is the option to use /etc/fstab in order to automatically mount the remote export at boot. If you choose to use this option, the example below should be added to your /etc/fstab file.

10.0.0.88:/home/user/music /home/user/Music  nfs rw 0 0

If you want to mount it read only, then use the following example

10.0.0.88:/home/user/music /home/user/Music  nfs ro  0 0

Once you have the fstab entry in place, if you want to mount it manually right away to try it out, just type the following

# mount -a

That's it! You now have your very own file server up and running. So rather than having to copy your music to every computer on your network or after every new install, you can simply mount the remote export folder by any other computer in the network. Saves a lot of time copying files to every computer or after every new install.