July 7, 2001  
 
 

2.2.2 Mount Partitions

Since the workstations will be sharing several of the server’s partitions, you will want those volumes mounted at startup automatically. We can accomplish this by adding several lines to the /etc/hosts file. But before we add those lines, we need to check to see if NFS is running properly on the server. To do this, we will mount the server partition /usr/local using the mount command:

mount –t nfs yourdomain.edu:/usr/local /usr/local

The “-t nfs” tells the mount command that the volume that we wish to mount is an NFS partition. Next, the mount command needs to know the name of the server, followed by the partition that you wish to use; these are separated by the colon. Finally, you tell the mount command that you want this NFS partition mounted locally as /usr/local. If it works correctly, the computer will act like nothing happened and deliver another command prompt. To check your mounted partitions, issue:

df -v

You should see a list of mounted partitions, including the /usr/local we just mounted. If you do not, check your workstation’s network connection see if you configured the NFS server correctly by going through the procedure in 2.1.7.

If the /usr/local partition mounted correctly, you can now modify the local /etc/hosts. A standard workstation /etc/hosts file looks like this:

LABEL=/     /           ext2       defaults   1 1
/dev/cdrom  /mnt/cdrom  iso9660    noauto     0 0
/dev/fd0    /mnt/floppy auto       noauto     0 0
none        /proc       proc       defaults   0 0
/dev/hda5   swap        swap       defaults   0 0

You file might look a bit different, listing all of your system’s partitions, including the root, “/,” and the “swap.” You will want to add the following lines to the end of your /etc/hosts file. Be sure to tab in between elements:

0.0.0.0:/usr/local   /usr/local  nfs defaults 0 2
0.0.0.0:/tmp         /mnt/pub    nfs defaults 0 2
0.0.0.0:/home        /home       nfs defaults 0 2

“0.0.0.0” should be replaced by the IP address of your server. You may also use the fully-qualified domain of the server instead of the IP, but I recommend the latter for complete reliability. Once you have edited the /etc/hosts file, you need to add the /mnt/pub directory:

mkdir /mnt/pub

This directory will be where your server’s /tmp directory — the one we will use for the public volume — mounts on startup.

 
   
 
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