It just goes without saying that one can never have enough hard drive space or RAM. In my office I have a Ubuntu server with Windows 2000 Advanced server running on virtualBox, Bella has a workstation running Kubuntu and I have a workstation running Kubuntu. The server and Bella's machine are both older boxes so I have added additional internal hard drives to both. Today in order to try to cut costs (electricity) my goal was to transfer everything off of Bella's machine to either the server or to her login on my machine and then shut down her machine.

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All of the business files were stored in /home/bella/Desktop on her machine and were then mounted to the same folder in her login on my machine. With NFS this is very easy to do. The only thing one has to really pay attention to is to make sure the permissions of the source folder matches the permissions of the folder where the mount is going to take place.

In order to share a folder using NFS perform the following:
1. Make sure the NFS Server package is installed on your machine.

2. Edit /etc/exports to add the directory you want to share. In the case where I wanted to share /home/bella/Desktop I added /home/bella/Desktop <- IP of machine you want to allow to mount this directory ->(rw,sync,fsid=0,crossmnt) to the /etc/exports file on her machine.

3. Using the terminal window run "sudo exportfs -a".

4. On the machine where you want to mount the shared directory, determine the directory you want to mount the share to. If the directory already exists, the contents will be replaced with the contents of the mounted share. The original contents will not be deleted, you just won't be able to see it. So in the case of Bella's Desktop, she didn't login to my machine, so the contents of the Desktop only changed on her machine.

5. Edit /etc/fstab on the machine where you want to mount the shared directory. Again in the case of mounting Bella's Desktop the I added bella:/home/bella/Desktop /home/bella/Desktop nfs rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14,intr,bg to the /etc/fstab on my machine.

6. All that is left to do is mount the share. There are a couple of ways to do this, both of which refers to the /etc/fstab.
a. "sudo mount /home/bella/Desktop" would check the /etc/fstab to determine how to mount the Desktop then do it.
b. "sudo mount -a" would attempt to mount every thing in /etc/fstab. If the mount is already mounted it just goes to the next one.

Check out this article for some other ideas on mounting NFS partitions.

Tags: linux, mounting shared folders, nfs, sharing folders