Setting up NFS & automount on RHEL

I believe that any Linux or UNIX server should start a very minimal build. Meaning that a server should only have the programs or packages installed that are needed for the operation of the server. To make some of my servers a little more functional I decided to install NFS and automount. This is so users can automount home directories and  mount external shares.

Follow the steps below to install NFS and autofs, so you can mount the NFS shares and mount home directories. The example below is on a RHEL 6 server.


To be able to mount NFS share you will need the following packages.
autofs
nfs-utils
nfs-utils-lib

Dependencies:
Hesiod
keyutils
libgssglue
libtirpc
python-argparse
rpcbind

Install the packages

root@server> yum install autofs  nfs-utils  nfs-utils-lib

To enable NFS shares you must add them to the /etc/fstab file. Example below.

10.12.12.8:/share /export/share  nfs noauto,nosuid,nodev,noguid,noxattr,timeout,sloppy 0 0
10.12.12.6:/cifs  /export/cifs  nfs noauto,nosuid,nodev,noguid,noxattr,timeout,sloppy 0 0
repos:/linux_repos /export/repos   nfs auto,ro,nosuid,nodev,noguid,noxattr,timeout,sloppy 0 0

To setup the automount funtion you need to edit the auto.home and auto.master files.
 Add the hostname or IP address line to /etc/auto.home

*             10.10.10.2:/home/&

Add this line to /etc/auto.master

/export/home /etc/auto.home -nolock,nosuid,noguid,nodev,nobrowse,noxattr --timeout 10

Restart services

root@server> service autofs restart
root@server> service rpcbind start
root@server> service nfs start

Ensure that autofs starts at boot

root@server> chkconfig –list autofs

Make mount points
Make the mount pint for all the mount points listed in the /etc/fstab file..

root@server> mkdir /export/share
root@server> mkdir /export/cifs
root@server> mkdir /export/repos

Note- make sure any host names used are added to the /etc/hosts file.

After following the steps above evey should be working. test the configuration by loggingin or becoming a user with a non local home directory. Also try to mount the shares.

root@server> mount /export/share

Check to see if the mount was successful.

root@server> df -h | grep share
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
10.12.12.8:/share  9.8G  1.9G  7.5G  20%   /export/share

Please let me know if you have any questions.