NFS Exports confusion

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Level 1

95 points

NFS Exports confusion

I am trying to export a share using NFS in Workgroup Manager. I have what I think should work but the client behaves as if there is nothing being exported.

I wanted to check /etc/exports to make sure WGM had done things sanely but I find that it doesn't exist! Apple's documentation and man pages make reference to this file. I'm comfortable creating it 'by hand' but I'd like to know what OS X did with the stuff I set up in WGM first!

thanks,
sean

Posted on Jun 18, 2008 11:58 AM

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Answer 1

Jul 21, 2008 11:22 AM in response to Sean Murphy3

On 10.4 and earlier the server GUI tools stored their NFS export settings in NetInfo.
In fact, if you did create that file, it would cause NFS to stop looking in NetInfo and
any exports stored in NetInfo would be ignored.

If "showmount -e" isn't showing anything on the server, you might want to check
/var/log/system.log to see if there are any NFS/mountd errors getting reported.

HTH
--macko

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Answer 2

Sean Murphy3 Author

Level 1

95 points

Jul 25, 2008 11:27 AM in response to Mike Mackovitch

thanks! showmount -e is helpful

what about in the netinfo-less world of leopard?

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Answer 3

Jul 25, 2008 1:54 PM in response to Sean Murphy3

"showmount" is a generic NFS tool. It's not tied to NetInfo at all. Pretty much the only relation of NetInfo to the NFS server is the aforementioned behavior of the NFS server getting exports from NetInfo if the /etc/exports file didn't exist.

In general, when debugging NFS issues you'll always want to check /var/log/system.log.
Other useful tools include:

showmount -e
rpcinfo -p

And of course, wireshark when you need to dissect the packets on the wire.
Note that showmount and rpcinfo can be run from the NFS client too, you just
need to include the server's name or IP address as an extra argument.

New in 10.5 are some helpful sub-commands included as part of the "nfsd" command:

nfsd -v status
nfsd checkexports

All of these tools have man pages that you can dig into if you need to.

HTH
--macko

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