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Mac OS X NFS Mounts
This section will help you in setting up the NFS mounts in Mac OS X. The first thing you need to do is decide where you want the mount to be in the file system. For our systems, we use /home. This is different then the default OS X location, which is at /Users, and this is a good thing. Local users (which is ONLY the admin account in our system) still have their home directory in /Users, but all network users have their home directories in /home.
This is actually the way you want it to be, since the folder you mount the nfs home directory into will overwrite anything in the directory it is mounted into. So, create an empty folder/directory which we will use to mount the nfs volume into. As I said, we made an empty folder at the root level of the Hard Drive name home.
Now, for the rest of the NFS setup we will use NetInfo manager. There are other ways of doing this, but NetInfo Manager handles it well since it has an automounter which will mount the volume when it is needed and put it away when it isn't. So, open /Applications/Utlities/NetInfo Manager. Click the lock in the bottom of the window to authenticate.
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Warning:
Be careful with the NetInfo Database if you do not know what you are doing. This is a really easy way to mess up your whole computer. Trivial mistakes in the NetInfo Database can cause the machine to not boot up or not be able to login.
Also, we have found one major problem in our NFS setup. Apparantly there is a problem with the way Mac OS X deals with NFS mounts when they are no longer available. As long as the NFS server is available, everything functions great. If the NFS server is NOT available, ALL Mac OS X machines are NOT usable AT ALL. The will not boot, login, or function, even under a local user account.
Our plan at this point in time is to put the information for the NFS mounts into the LDAP database instead of manual putting the information into every Mac's NetInfo Database like we currently do. However, we have not yet had time to try and test this idea. |
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Be VERY careful to follow the instruction exactly as shown here. It is REALLY easy to do a little bitty thing wrong and mess up the whole thing. Also, if the NFS mount information is in wrong, the machine can have SERIOUS problems. We are looking into a way to fix this problem, but have not yet finished a solution. Once the system is working, it works great, but there can be frustrating times while setting it up. Here is an image of what our NetInfo window looks like when finished. Refer to this picture while following the instructions:
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1) Click on the mounts section in the list of fields.
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2) Click the New button at the top left of the window. This will give you a new directory to the right of the mounts section.
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3) Now, click into the bottom part of the window. While in the bottom part of that window, click the New button in the top left of the window THREE (3) more times. You should now have FOUR (4) Properties in the bottom section of the window, under the new directory you created in step 2.
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4) Click the Property field under the first (topmost) value. Change the Property to vfstype. Then, change the Value to nfs. You can see an exact example of this in the screen shot above.
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5) Tab down to (or click to) the second entry. Change the Property to dir. Then, change the Value to /home (or whatever you have chosen as the mount point for the system as I discussed above! This MUST be the empty directory you created earlier).
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6) Tab down to (or click to) the second entry. Change the Property to name. Then, change the Value to host.domain.com:/mount_name. This is the NFS server address. You can use the IP address, or the domain name. Make sure it is exactly right, and working before doing this. In the screen shot example above, the server is named disk, and it is in the cs subdomain, under the dixie.edu domain. This gives the name disk.cs.dixie.edu. The last part, the :/home is the NFS export being served out by the server. We named the export on the server home, and it is found at the root level of the servers file system. This gives the full name for the NFS server of disk.cs.dixie.edu:/home. Follow that pattern to create the entry for your NFS server.
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7) Tab down to (or click to) the second entry. Change the Property to opts. Then, change the Value to -b net -P -s. These are the different options being passed to the NFS server when it mounts the volume. As far as we know, these are all required to get the mount to work correctly under OS X.
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8) Save the changes under the Domain>Save Changes menu, and exit. You will have to restart the machine to test the changes. After you restart, you should be able to navigate to the /home (or whatever you called it) and see the contents of the NFS export from the server.
That is all you need to set up your NFS Mounts in OS X. It is VERY simple, and once you know what you are doing it will only take a minute or two per machine, but you have to be very careful and make sure it's all perfect the first couple times you test it.
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