[ Thanks to Dave for
this link. ]
“NFS was developed at a time when we weren’t able to share our
drives like we are able to today–in the Windows environment. It
offers the ability to share the hard disk space of a big server
with many smaller clients. Again, this is a client/server
environment. While this seems like a standard service to offer, it
was not always like this. In the past, clients and servers were
unable to share their disk space.“Thin clients have no hard drives and thus need a ‘virtual’
hard-disk. The NFS mount their hard disk from the server and, while
the user thinks they are saving their documents to their local
(thin client) disk, they are in fact saving them to the server. In
a thin client environment, the root, usr and home partitions are
all offered to the client from the server via NFS…”