This article will be short and to the point, so whoever wants to mount a remote nfs share in their local machine they should be able to get it up and running in 5 mins or less. Here we go!
Step – 1 Setup AWS security groups
In your EC2 instance setup following Security group exemptions, it would be a good idea to create a separate security group called “NFS Services” or something to leave these exemptions separate from the rest of your security groups.
TCP Port (Service) Source 111 0.0.0.0/0 2049 0.0.0.0/0 32768 0.0.0.0/0 44182 0.0.0.0/0 54508 0.0.0.0/0 UDP Port (Service) Source 111 0.0.0.0/0 2049 0.0.0.0/0 32768 0.0.0.0/0 32770 – 32800 0.0.0.0/0
I have set source to 0.0.0.0 for those ports but I do restrict who can access those services via /etc/hosts.deny in next step. Or if you prefer set the IP address of the client machine (external ip) to source when you add those port exemptions.
Step – 2 Install the NFS server
You need a running NFS service in your remote server so that the client can access shared directories/paths, install nfs server by typing the following line in the terminal of your aws instance.
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install nfs-kernel-server
Step – 3 Decide what you want to share
Whatever you wanna share should go in /etc/exports file. So edit it using nano/vi/ or whatever text editor you have in the terminal, I use nano here
sudo nano /etc/exports
and add entries of the directories you want to share
/home/purinda *(rw,async,insecure,all_squash,no_subtree_check,anonuid=1001,anongid=1001) /opt *(rw,no_subtree_check,sync,insecure)
If you read a nice article on how these exports thingy work you will figure out that the astrix is to specify the client IP (which can be specified as a CIDR address such as 241.111.42.23/32 or * to allow any client).
I have a different configuration set for /home/purinda as I use a Mac OSx 10.8.2 mountain lion client which uses nfsv2 client to connect and it require some security tweaks like I have mentioned. Or read my other article on this subject.
Step – 4 Reload the NFS service
Type
sudo service nfs-kernel-server reload
to reload the NFS service on your ec2 instance.
and you may or may not require
exports -av
Step – 5 Connect!
In your local/desktop open up a terminal and create a directory which should be used for mounting the remote directory, for example if you want the remote /home/purinda mounted in your /Volumes/purinda in MacOS x
then
mkdir /Volumes/purinda mount -t nfs -o nfsvers=2 <elastic-ip-of-ec2>:/home/purinda /Volumes/purinda/
on a linux desktop/client you may be able to just do
mount -t nfs <elastic-ip-of-ec2>:/home/purinda /Volumes/purinda/
Enjoy!
The Red–black tree 