An NFS file server provides an easy way to share large amounts of data among the users and com- puters in an organization. An administrator of a Linux system that is configured to share its file systems using NFS has to perform the following tasks to set up NFS:

1. Set up the network. If a LAN or other network link is already connecting the computers on which you want to use NFS, you already have the network you need.

2. Choose what to share on the server. Decide which file systems on your Linux NFS server to make available to other computers. You can choose any point in the file system and make all files and directories below that point accessible to other computers.

3. Set up security on the server. You can use several different security features to suit the level of security with which you are comfortable. Mount-level security lets you restrict the computers that can mount a resource and, for those allowed to mount it, lets you specify whether it can be mounted read/write or read-only. With user-level security, you map users from the client systems to users on the NFS server so that they can rely on standard Linux read/write/execute permissions, file ownership, and group permissions to access and pro- tect files. Linux systems that support Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux), such as Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, offer another means of offering or restricting shared NFS files and directories.

4. Mount the file system on the client. Each client computer that is allowed access to the server's NFS shared file system can mount it anywhere the client chooses. For example, you may mount a file system from a computer called maple on the /mnt/maple directory in your local file system. After it is mounted, you can view the contents of that directory by typing ls /mnt/maple. Then you can use the cd command below the /mnt/maple mount point to see the files and directories it contains.