"The Network File System (NFS) is a well-used
distributed file system that enables file operations to be
performed on a server from remote clients. The server makes its
directories or filesystems available to the rest of the world using
an operation known as export. To access these directories, the
client mounts the exported directories or filesystems to its local
directory hierarchy. Inside the mounted directory, clients access
the remote files as if they were stored locally on the machine.
Currently, NFS sports three available versions for exporting and
mounting of directories or filesystems: versions 2, 3, and 4.
"In this article, we show you how to use a generic NFS mount to
consolidate exporting and mounting of all existing NFS version into
a single, seamless mechanism. Let's consider a scenario where the
server has exported directory entries for all three versions of
NFS. Currently, for the client to access all these entries, it has
to separately mount each of these entries at different mount
points. Although NFS version 4 provides a pseudo-tree mechanism
that enables a single mount of all NFSv4 exported entries, it is
applicable only to the entries made by that version. The client has
to separately mount version 2 and 3 entries along with a single
mount for version 4 (in case the pseudo-tree exists)."
