Okay, the setup is as follows,

I am running two OpenBSD boxes in my room, "Skeletor" (master) and "Beastman" (the goon)

And I'm wondering how to mount, say, my media directory on Skeletor (/mda) on Beastman via NFS. How do I go about this, as I have never used NFS before?

NFS is quite easy, if it wasn't it wan't have been used for so much time by so much people, would it

By default (read: if you haven't recompiled you kernel) OpenBSD, starting from version 1.3 uses NFSv4, wich differs from v3 by using TCP as transport.

Skeletor configuration

NFS configuration file is /etc/exports. There are many options that you can use in your /etc/exports file, and it is best that you read the exports(5) man page. Assuming the network is 10.0.0.0, we have an /etc/exports that looks like this:



This means that the local filesystem /mda will be made available via NFS. -alldirs specifies that clients will be able to mount at any point under the /mda mount point. -ro specifies that it will only be allowed to be mounted read-only. The last two arguments specify that only clients within the 10.0.0.0 network using a netmask of 255.255.255.0 will be authorized to mount this filesystem. This is important for some servers that are accessible by different networks.

portmap(8) must be running for NFS to operate. Portmap is off by default on OpenBSD 3.2 and later, so you must add the line to rc.conf.local(8) and reboot.

Next, you should add the line to /etc/rc.conf.local. This will bring up both nfsd(8) and mountd(8) when you reboot.

Beastman configuration

You should add this code to your /etc/fstab



or, if dns or /etc/hosts are configured properly,



I hope, you as an experienced user, know what to do with it? Such things as mounting it all without reboot should be common to you - just start the server manually with


And mount with


To restart the server, run


Run this to see stats



More details at OpenBSD FAQ - NFS.

Feel free to ask me more questions about UNIX, aspecially OpenBSD, I'm a kernel developer of that, and I am very proud of it, that's why I say it on every corner.

This post has been edited by Val-Amart: Apr 8 2006, 05:23 PM