NFS client

An NFS client requests that a filesystem exported from an NFS server be grafted onto its local namespace.

For the client to work, you need to first start the version 2 or 3 of the NFS filesystem manager (fs-nfs2 or fs-nfs3). The file handle in version 2 is a fixed-size array of 32 bytes. With version 3, it's a variable-length array of 64 bytes.

Note: If possible, you should use fs-nfs3 instead of fs-nfs2.

The fs-nfs2 or fs-nfs3 filesystem manager is also the NFS 2 or NFS 3 client daemon operating over TCP/IP. To use it, you must have an NFS server and you must be running a TCP/IP transport layer such as that provided by io-pkt*. It also needs socket.so and libc.so.

You can create NFS mountpoints with the mount command by specifying nfs for the type and -o ver3 as an option. You must start fs-nfs3 or fs-nfs3 before creating mountpoints in this manner. If you start fs-nfs2 or fs-nfs3 without any arguments, it runs in the background so you can use mount.

To make the request, the client uses the mount utility, as in the following examples:

In the first example, the client requests that the /home directory on an IP host be mounted onto the local namespace as /mnt/home. In the second example, NFS protocol version 3 is used for the network filesystem.

Here's another example of a command line that starts and mounts the client:

fs-nfs3  10.7.0.197:/home/bob  /homedir
Note: Although NFS 2 is older than POSIX, it was designed to emulate UNIX filesystem semantics and happens to be relatively close to POSIX.