NFS is the network file system, which is used to mount or link the file system or simply folders from one linux machine to another linux machine.
This mounting makes folders and files transparently available  to the other linux machines across the network.

NFS service

NFS service is the linux service application which runs nfs server on the background, so that nfs clients can access.

How to start the NFS file system

service nfs start

or

service nfs restart

or

/etc/init.d/nfs start

or

/etc/init.d/nfs restart

But before starting nfs service you should make sure that portmap service is running, this is because nfs service depends on portmap service

How to start portmap service

service portmap start

or

service portmap restart

or

/etc/init.d/portmap start

or

/etc/init.d/portmap restart

Mounting means just copying the files from source Linux machine to the target Linux machine, to be exact it is  not exactly copy, but it is a link  to the file(s) from the source computer through LAN network and you would see all the files as those were local files.

To have this NFS file system in your computer, you should have NFS service daemon and portmap service daemon installed, and most probably these service comes with your linux operating system.

To check if the NFS and portmap service daemons installed or not, run below commands

service portmap status

If portmap is already installed, it will shows the status otherwise shows unrecognized service.

service nfs status

If NFS is already installed, it will shows the status otherwise shows unrecognized service.

Finally, to mount file/files from one computer to another computer, run below command

mount -t nfs <target_host_ip>:/file/path /file/path

<target_host_ip>:/file/path – target is the your target linux computer and /file/path is file path that you want to mount or copy to the another machine. The path should be from root.

Second argument “/file/path” is the folder path in your target linux  box, and this should be exist, mean you should create it before doing mount.

I hope you this help in mounting files between linux machines.

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