NFS Servers and Clients
The terms client and server describe the roles that a system assumes when sharing file systems. Servers are systems that share their file systems over a network. The systems that access these file systems are the clients.
Clients access files on the server by mounting the server's shared file systems. When a client mounts a remote file system, the client 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 server's shared file system transparently. The mount resembles a local mount. You can type commands as if the file systems are local. For more information, see Mounting File Systems.
After a file system has been shared on a server through an NFS operation, the file system can be accessed from a client. You can mount an NFS file system automatically with autofs
. For information about autofs
, see About Autofs. For information about tasks that involve the share
command and autofs
, see Automatic File System Sharing and Autofs Administration.