The NFS Daemons Next Up Previous Contents
Next: The exports File Up: The Network File System Previous: Mounting an NFS Volume

The NFS Daemons

If you want to provide NFS service to other hosts, you have to run the nfsd and mountd daemons on your machine. As RPC-based programs, they are not managed by inetd, but are started up at boot time, and register themselves with the portmapper. Therefore, you have to make sure to start them only after rpc.portmap is running. Usually, you include the following two lines in your rc.inet2 script:

     if [ -x /usr/sbin/rpc.mountd ]; then
             /usr/sbin/rpc.mountd; echo -n " mountd"
     fi
     if [ -x /usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd ]; then
             /usr/sbin/rpc.nfsd; echo -n " nfsd"
     fi

The ownership information of files a NFS daemon provides to its clients usually contains only numerical user and group id's. If both client and server associate the same user and group names with these numerical id's, they are said to share the same uid/gid space. For example, this is the case when you use NIS to distribute the passwd information to all hosts on your LAN.

On some occasions, however, they do not match. Rather updating the uid's and gid's of the client to match those of the server, you can use the ugidd mapping daemon to work around this. Using the map_daemon option explained below, you can tell nfsd to map the server's uid/gid space to the client's uid/gid space with the aid of the ugidd on the client.

ugidd is an RPC-based server, and is started from rc.inet2 just like nfsd and mountd.

     if [ -x /usr/sbin/rpc.ugidd ]; then
             /usr/sbin/rpc.ugidd; echo -n " ugidd"
     fi

Andrew Anderson
Thu Mar 7 23:22:06 EST 1996