Network File System has been part of the world of free operating systems and proprietary UNIX flavors since the mid-1980s. But not all administrators know how it works or why there have been new releases. It is important to know about NFS simply because the system is vital for seamless access across UNIX networks. Learn how the latest release of NFS, NFSv4, has addressed many criticisms, particularly with regard to security problems, that became apparent in versions 2 and 3.
From the article:
In fact, it took a long time before Linux fully supported NSFv3. When NSFv4 came along, this lack was addressed quickly, and it wasn’t just Solaris, AIX, and FreeBSD that enjoyed full NSFv4 support.
I know there’s client support for NFS4 on FreeBSD, but I’m not aware that the server supports v4. But I haven’t been following recent discussions and development progress, so I may be wrong. Does anyone have any details?
Doesn’t look like it’s “officially” in FreeBSD yet…
http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-apr-2006-jun-2006.html#Fr…
There was some talk about getting a v4 server into 7.x, but I think nothing ever got done. The client does in fact support v4.
Now if Microsoft would at least provide a workable NFS client, life would be a lot easier for a lot of people, since their SFU stuff is really, really bad.
The NFSv4 server for BSD’s can be found here: http://www.cis.uoguelph.ca/~nfsv4/
as always nothing worth reading on ibm.com …
What I really like about NFS (any version really) is that not only is it now the “standard” network filing system on pretty well every UNIX box out there (and is mostly cross-platform client vs. server compatible), but it’s very easy to set up. Just enable the service, edit /etc/fstab (or your automount config files) and you’re done (OK, there’s machine authorisation on the server to add, but that’s straightforward).
Sadly, the same can’t be said of the clustered filing systems out there. Want 2 balanced Web server boxes with shared Web trees and no single point of failure? Can’t use NFS (the server is a single point of failure) and I’ve tried several clustered filing systems and they’re horrendous to setup and often don’t work.
If you’re trying to present Linux as a viable small 2 or 3 server cluster for Web serving, this problem of truly clustered filing system that’s easy to set up just hasn’t been solved yet. Red Hat/Oracle’s solution, BTW, is terrible – they want you to buy ultra-expensive shared SCSI devices and attach them to each box! So when are we going to see “CNFS” then (Clustered Network Filing System) – this would be one of the biggest advances in UNIX filing systems since NFS itself was invented…
You might want to have a look at PVFS2 ( http://www.pvfs.org/pvfs2/ ) as a cluster filesystem. I’ve set it up in conjunction with a Warewulf ( http://warewulf-cluster.org ) cluster and it was relatively painless. No special hardware required; my installation was on a bunch of old IBM 300GL machines.
It’s great to see many of the major OSes and filers now supporting NFSv4 (Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, Linux, Network Appliance, EMC, etc) and hopefully acceptance will be quicker than NFSv3.
There are some great features (common user namespace across domains, delegation, ACLs, security, integrated locking support, compound RPC operations, etc) that almost every current NFSv2/NFSv3 user could benefit from.