| Chapter 12. Network File System (NFS) | ||
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| Chapter 12. Network File System (NFS) | ||
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Table of Contents
In a strict UNIX/Linux environment (i.e. One in which there is little interaction with Windows clients machines), there are two services that are very useful - those being NFS or the Network File System and NIS of the Network Information Service. NIS had a name change some years back - at that time is was called YelloPages, but this named had been copyrighted by another company and so SUN, the original developers of NIS were forced to change it's name - hence NIS. NIS utilities however have not followed this change of name and thus many of the utilities still begin with yp<this> and yp<that> - a point of some confusion to those new to NIS.
NFS was developed at a time when we weren't able to share our drives like we are able to today - in the Windows environment. It offers the ability to share the hard disk space of a big server with many smaller clients. Again, this is a client/server environment. While this seems like a standard service to offer, it was not always like this. In the past, clients and servers were unable to share their disk space.
NFS is gaining in popularity again primarily due to the move to thin-client technology. Thin clients have no hard drives and thus need a "virtual" hard-disk. The NFS mount their hard disk from the server and, while the user thinks they are saving their documents to their local (thin client) disk, they are in fact saving them to the server. In a thin client environment, the root, usr and home partitions are all offered to the client from the server via NFS.
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| Troubleshooting TCP-wrappers |  |
How can we use NFS? |