O’Reilly Network: Understanding NFS

“We’ve discussed sharing filesystems via SMB a few
times. SMB lets you access files shared by a Windows system after
jumping through only half a dozen loops. Sharing files with another
Unix system is much, much simpler. FreeBSD supports the Unix
standard Network File System out of the box. NFS intimidates many
junior system administrators, but it’s really quite simple once you
know what’s going on.

Each NFS connection works on a client-server model. One computer
is the server and offers filesystems to other systems. This is
called “NFS exporting,” and the filesystems offered are called
“exports.” The clients can mount server exports in a manner almost
identical to that used to mount local filesystems.

One interesting thing about NFS is it’s statelessness. You can
reboot a server and the client won’t crash. It won’t be able to
access files on the server’s export while the server is down, but
once it returns, you’ll pick up right where things left off. Other
network file sharing systems are not so resilient.”

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