Jacob Brett

Wanting to share files over my home network to other devices, I settled on the NFS protocol. Specifically, I decided to use the program autofs as it automatically mounts shares of local files on-demand (thus reducing system overhead when the shared files aren’t needed). I wanted to write myself a concise guide for easy set-up in the future, so here goes:

Firstly, install autofs and nfs-kernel-server. Then, create a directory to map your shares to with sudo mkdir /export.

In my instance, I appended the following to /etc/auto.master:

/export	/etc/auto.export --timeout=60

and the following to /etc/auto.export (a file I’ve designated to handle mounts to the /export directory):

jacobbrett \
	/Movies		-fstype=nfs4,ro	:/home/jacobbrett/Videos/Movies \
	/Music		-fstype=nfs4,ro	:/home/jacobbrett/Music \
	/Music\ Videos	-fstype=nfs4,ro	:/home/jacobbrett/Videos/Music\ Videos \
	/TV\ Series	-fstype=nfs4,ro	:/home/jacobbrett/Videos/TV\ Series

Finally, I appended the following to /etc/exports:

/export/jacobbrett/Movies         192.168.1.0/24(ro,async,subtree_check)
/export/jacobbrett/Music          192.168.1.0/24(ro,async,subtree_check)
"/export/jacobbrett/Music Videos" 192.168.1.0/24(ro,async,subtree_check)
"/export/jacobbrett/TV Series"    192.168.1.0/24(ro,async,subtree_check)

This ensures that only computers on my local network can access the shares (specified by 192.168.1.0/24); async is also a significant option. Additionally, you may wish to add the option insecure so that shares may be accessed via XBMC.

Now, start your NFS server with sudo start nfs-kernel-server and the autofs service with sudo start autofs (alternatively, use the command restart if either are already running). Congratulations.

showmount -a should output all client devices and shares they’ve mounted. e.g. (where 192.168.1.101 is a device on my local network):

192.168.1.101:/export/jacobbrett/Music

To enumerate: autofs first reads auto.master. My reference to /etc/auto.export is discovered, with a timeout of 60 seconds—that is, Any file (or directory) referenced within /etc/auto.export will automatically unmount after 60 seconds of no access (this lessens server overhead). I’ve set files referenced within /etc/auto.export to be mounted within /export, as per the above output of showmount seen above.

Further reading:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6: Storage Administration Guide: 9.4. autofs
• Community Ubuntu Documentation: SettingUpNFSHowTo
• Community Ubuntu Documentation: autofs