NFS Servers and Clients

The terms client and server are used to describe the roles that a computer plays when sharing file systems. If a file system resides on a computer's disk and that computer makes the file system available to other computers on the network, that computer acts as a server. The computers that are accessing that file system are said to be clients. The NFS service enables any given computer to access any other computer's file systems and, at the same time, to provide access to its own file systems. A computer can play the role of client, server, or both at any given time on a network.

Clients access files on the server by mounting the server's shared file systems. When a client mounts a remote file system, it does not make a copy of the file system; rather, the mounting process uses a series of remote procedure calls that enable the client to access the file system transparently on the server's disk. The mount looks like a local mount and users type commands as if the file systems were local.

After a file system has been shared on a server through an NFS operation, it can be accessed from a client. You can mount an NFS file system automatically with autofs.