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

# Preparing NFS

Before you can use NFS, be it as server or client, you must make sure your kernel has NFS support compiled in. Newer kernels have a simple interface on the proc filesystem for this, the /proc/filesystems file, which you can display using cat:

         $ cat /proc/filesystems
         minix
         ext2
         msdos
         nodev   proc
         nodev   nfs

If nfs is missing from this list, then you have to compile your own kernel with NFS enabled. Configuring the kernel network options is explained in section ``Kernel Configuration'' in chapter-.

For older kernels prior to -1.1, the easiest way to find out whether your kernel has NFS support enabled is to actually try to mount an NFS file system. For this, you could create a directory below /tmp, and try to mount a local directory on it:

         # mkdir /tmp/test
         # mount localhost:/etc /tmp/test

If this mount attempt fails with an error message saying ``fs type nfs no supported by kernel'', you must make a new kernel with NFS enabled. Any other error messages are completely harmless, as you haven't configured the NFS daemons on your host yet.