Administering NFS Referrals

NFS referrals are a way for an NFSv4 server to point to file systems located on other NFSv4 servers, as a way of connecting multiple NFSv4 servers into a uniform namespace.

How to Create and Access an NFS Referral

1. On an NFS server: create a referral.

   Add the referral on an NFS-shared file system, pointing to one or more existing NFS-shared file systems.

   server1% nfsref add /share/docs server2:/usr/local/docs server3:/tank/docs
   Created reparse point /share/docs

2. Verify that the referral was created.

   server1% nfsref lookup /share/docs
   /share/docs points to:
   server2:/usr/local/docs
   server3:/tank/docs

3. On a client: mount the referral.

   client1% pfexec mount server1:/share/docs /mnt

4. Verify that the mount worked.

   client1% cd /mnt/docs
   client1% df -k .
   /mnt/docs     (server2:/usr/local/docs):10372284465 blocks 10372284465 files

Example 5-3 Modifying an Existing Referral

If you wanted to add another file system, such as server4:/tank/docs to the existing referral, you would enter the command from step 2 above with the new file system.

server1% nfsref add /share/docs server2:/usr/local/docs server3:/tank/docs server4:/tank/docs

The add subcommand simply replaces the information in the current referral with the new information from the command. The add subcommand is how you would modify the file systems associated with an existing referral.

How to Remove an NFS Referral

Follow this procedure to remove an NFS referral.

• Remove the referral.

  server1% nfsref remove /share/docs
  Removed svc_type 'nfs-basic' from /share/docs