The Oracle Solaris 11 release includes the following enhancements:
A new property, nfs_props/showmount_info, has been added to the /network/nfs/server:default service. This property controls the amount of information that the showmount command displays to remote clients. For more information about the nfs_props/showmount_info property, see the showmount(1M) man page.
Support for the Federated File System (FedFS) referrals has been added. This feature enables referral information for several servers to be centralized in LDAP. For more information about FedFS referrals, see Administering FedFS.
The configuration properties that used to be set by editing the /etc/default/autofs and /etc/default/nfs files can now be set in the Service Management Facility (SMF) repository. For more information about the new SMF properties and the daemons using the new SMF properties, see NFS Daemons.
The NFS service provides support for mirror mounts. Mirror mounts enable an NFS Version 4 client to traverse shared file system mount points in the server namespace. For NFS Version 4 mounts, the automounter performs a mount of the server namespace root and relies on mirror mounts to access its file systems. The main advantage that mirror mounts offer over the automounter is that mounting a file system using mirror mounts does not require the overhead associated with administering automount maps. Mirror mounts provide the following features:
Namespace changes are immediately visible to all clients.
New shared file systems are discovered instantly and mounted automatically.
File systems unmount automatically after a designated inactivity period.
For more information about mirror mounts, see:
NFS referrals have been added to the NFS service. Referrals are server-based redirections that an NFS Version 4 client can follow to find a file system. The NFS server supports referrals created by the nfsref command. The NFS Version 4 client follows these referrals to mount the file system from the actual location. The creation of referrals replaces the editing of the automounter map. NFS referrals provide these features:
All of the features of mirror mounts
Automounter-like functionality without any dependence on the automounter
No setup required on either the client or server
For more information about NFS referrals, see:
The ability to mount the per-DNS-domain root of a FedFS namespace has been added. This mount point can be used with NFS referrals to bridge from one file server to another file server, building an arbitrarily large namespace. For more information about FedFS domain root, see:
The sharectl utility enables you to configure and manage file sharing protocols, such as NFS. For example, this utility enables you to set client and server operational properties, display property values for a specific protocol, and obtain the status of a protocol. For more information, see the sharectl(1M) man page.
The ability to restrict NFS service to clients which use reserved ports, that is port numbers below 1024, has been added. This affects file systems shared with AUTH_SYS. This can be set for all shares by using the resvport setting with the sharectl command, or for individual file systems by using the resvport share option.