Hitchhiker's Guide to Openbsd

Setting up an NFS Server
These services must be enabled and running on the server: 
●
portmap(8)
●
mountd(8)
 
●
nfsd(8)
 
By default each of these is disabled in OpenBSD. Add the following lines to 
rc.conf.local(8)
to enable 
them: 
portmap=YES
nfs_server=YES
The next step is to configure the list of filesystems that will be made available for clients to mount. 
In this example, we have a server with IP address 10.0.0.1. This server will be serving NFS only to 
clients within its own subnet. All of this is configured in the /etc/exports file. This file lists which 
filesystems you wish to have accessible via NFS and defines who is able to access them. There are many 
options that you can use in /etc/exports; it is best that you read the 
exports(5)
man page. For our example 
server, we've setup an exports file that looks like this: 
#
# NFS exports Database
# See exports(5) for more information. Be very careful, 
misconfiguration
# of this file can result in your filesystems being 
readable by the world.
/work -alldirs -ro -network=10.0.0 -mask=255.255.255.0
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq6.html (17 of 33)9/4/2011 10:02:06 AM

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6 - Networking
This means that the local filesystem 
/work
will be made available via NFS. The 
-alldirs
option 
specifies that clients will be able to mount at any point under 
/work
as well as 
/work
itself. For 
example, if there was a directory called 
/work/monday
, clients could mount 
/work
(and have access 
to all files/directories underneath that directory) or they could mount 
/work/monday
and have access 
to just the files/directories contained there. The 
-ro
option specifies that clients will only be granted 
read-only access. 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. 
Another important security note: don't just add a filesystem to /etc/exports without some kind of list of 
allowed host(s). Without a list of hosts which can mount a particular directory, anyone who can reach 
your server will be able to mount your NFS exported directories. 
Now you can start the server services. You can either reboot (after enabling them as per the instructions 
above) or run them manually. 
# /usr/sbin/portmap
# echo -n >/var/db/mountdtab
# /sbin/mountd
# /sbin/nfsd -tun 4
The arguments passed to nfsd enable TCP (-t) and UDP (-u) connections and enable 4 instances (-n) of 
nfsd to run. You should set an appropriate number of NFS server instances to handle the maximum 
number of concurrent client requests that you want to service. 
You're now ready to mount the exported filesystems from the client(s). 
Remember: If you make changes to /etc/exports while NFS is already running, you need to make 
mountd aware of this! Just HUP mountd and the changes will take affect. 
# kill -HUP `cat /var/run/mountd.pid`