Configuring Basic NFS Server+Client on RHEL7

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So, you want to configure NFS? This isn’t too difficult to do. First of all you will need to, in the simplest setup, create 2 servers, one acting as the NFS server which hosts the content and attached disks. The second server, acting as the client, which mounts the filesystem of the NFS server over the network to a local mount point on the client. In RHEL 7 this is remarkably easy to do.

Install and Configure NFS on the Server

Install dependencies 

yum -y install nfs-utils rpcbind

Create a directory on the server

This is the directory we will share 

 mkdir -p /opt/nfs

Configure access for the client server on ip 10.0.0.2 

vi /etc/exports

# alternatively you can directly pipe the configuration but I don't recommend it
echo "/opt/nfs 10.0.0.2(no_root_squash,rw,sync)" > /etc/exports

Open Firewall ports used by NFS 

firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=2049/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --reload

Restart NFS services & check NFS status 

service rpcbind start; service nfs start
service nfs status

Install and configure NFS on the Client

Install dependencies & start rpcbind 

yum install nfs-utils rpcbind
service rpcbind start

Create directory to mount NFS 

# Directory we will mount our Network filesystem on the client
mkdir -p /mnt/nfs
# The server ip address is 10.0.0.1, with the path /opt/nfs, we want to mount it to the client on /mnt/nfs this could be anything like
# /mnt/randomdata-1234 etc as long as the folder exists;
mount 10.0.0.1:/opt/nfs /mnt/nfs/

Check that the NFS works 

echo "meh testing.." > /mnt/nfs/testing.txt
cat /mnt/nfs/testing.txt
ls -al /mnt/nfs

You should see the filesystem now has testing.txt on it. Confirming you setup NFS correctly.

Make NFS mount permanent by enabling the service permanently, and adding the mount to fstab

This will cause the server to automount the fs during boot time 

systemctl enable nfs-server

vi /etc/fstab
10.0.0.1:/opt/nfs	/mnt/nfs	nfs	defaults 		0 0

# OR you could simply pipe the configuration to the file (this is really dangerous though)
# Unless you are absolutely sure what you are doing
echo "10.0.0.1:/opt/nfs	/mnt/nfs	nfs	defaults 		0 0" >> /etc/fstab

If you reboot the client now, you should see that the NFS mount comes back.