ExpertCentral.coman About company
Your Search is Over!
Expert Home Sign Up My ExpertCentral Answer Library Help
Search for Experts in 
View question by Expert saintly
Question History!
From : lrasmussen
To : saintly
User Comment : I can't thank you enough for answering both my questions so quickly! I'm not able to get to my Linux box right now, but I'm sure it will work. I really appreciate the great explanation, I was unable to find anything on my own about this. I had heard of NFS, but I wasn't sure if that was what I was supposed to use or not. Now I know. Thanks again!
Rating :
Message Status : Public

[08-05-2000] lrasmussen : How do you share files over a Linux network? I have to Linux boxes (RH6.1) and am curious to know how they can share files. Although I hate to make the comparison, I am wondering if there is anything like Network Neighborhood that is used, and if so where can I find more information about setting it up? I have used Samba, but I thought that was for mixing Win and Linux. Any help is appreciated!
[08-06-2000] saintly : There ae several methods of sharing files over a UNIX/linux network. You are correct about Samba; its intended purpose is to share files between UNIX and Windows.

The traditional file-sharing system on Linux is NFS (Network filesystem). I believe support for NFS is enabled by default in RedHat.

First, on the machine that wishes to share its filesystems, edit the file /etc/exports. Create a line that looks something like this:

/filesystem hostname.to.export.to

You can usually only export an entire filesystem, not just a part of one. If I have two machines named 'foo' and 'bar', and want 'bar' to be able to access the /usr filesystem on 'foo', I would add the following line to 'foo's /etc/exports:

/usr bar

Then restart the nfs daemon on foo to force it to read the changes you made to the /etc/exports file. Try

/etc/rc.d/init.d/nfs restart

or if NFS is not running at all:
/etc/rc.d/init.d/nfs start

Now on the 'bar' system, you need a place to mount 'foo's shared filesystem. Once you mount it, you can treat foo:/usr as if it were a local directory.

mkdir /mnt; mkdir /mnt/foo

Now mount the remote filesystem:

mount foo:/usr /mnt/foo

And test it:

ls -l /mnt/foo

should show you the contents of foo's /usr system. You can cd to /mnt/foo normally, all of the subdirectories in foo's /usr are accessible to you.

There are other security options you can use as well. I'd recommend reading the following guides from RedHat about NFS:

http://www.redhat.com/support/manuals/RHL-6.2-Manual/ref-guide/s1-sysadmin-nfs.html
http://www.redhat.com/support/docs/tips/NFS-Tips/NFS-Tips.html

There is also an O'Reilly book; 'managing NFS and NIS' you might want to look at, but it is a bit outdated at this point.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/nfs/

ExpertCentral.com
Home | Sign Up | My ExpertCentral | Answer Library | Help | Log Out
Public Board | How it Works | Why Join? | Tell a Friend | About Us | Contact Us

Copyright © 2000 ExpertCentral.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
ExpertCentral and ExpertCentral.com are trademarks of ExpertCentral.com, Inc.
Use of this site constitutes your acceptance to the terms and conditions of the ExpertCentral Member Agreement.