A Waage Blog

This guide shows you how to start an NFS service on one (host) machine, export the NFS drive, and then connect to that NFS drive from a client machine.

## On the NFS host machine:

#Start Portmap service if needed.
#NFS uses portmap and a bunch of ports (that you can set in /etc/sysconfig/nfs) if you want.
See this link for more details on NFS ports.

#Start portmap service

service portmap status
service portmap start (if needed)

#Start NFS

service nfs start

#Edit /etc/exports
#Reference: https://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-3-Manual/ref-guide/s1-nfs-server-export.html

Format is (select the options you want):
[Directory to export] [Hosts to allow](options)

/home/just_testing 192.168.0.0/24(rw,async,wdelay,root_squash)

#Run exportfs to refresh NFS exports

exportfs -av

Be sure the proper ports are open on iptables
Reference: http://pario.no/2008/01/15/allow-nfs-through-iptables-on-a-redhat-system/

## Now on your NFS client machine:
Start portmap

service portmap start

Create a mount point and mount the NFS drive. Remember to use your own server’s IP address:

mkdir /mnt/nfs-usbdisk
mount 192.168.0.2:/home/just_testing /mnt/nfs-usbdisk

Voila ! Tail your logs if you have any problems !

It sounds easy, but I tried a lot of things before finding the solution I used.

I tried using:

`host 66.249.67.49` or
`nslookup 66.249.67.49`

These were fine, but it seems a bit hacky to use the shell. Also, it would require some sort of parsing to get the hostname that I want.

Browsing the web, I found a couple solutions that almost worked.

s = Socket.getaddrinfo('66.249.67.49',nil)
hostname = s[0][2]

This solution worked in IRB, worked in console, but for some reason would not work when I was running my mongrel server and trying to perform the exact same method call from a web-browser. ( I still don’t know why).

Digging around a bit more, I came up with this simple solution:

host = Resolv.new.getname('66.249.67.49')

Is it really that easy?? Give it a shot and let me know your thoughts !!