Sharing spaces between Linux hosts (Fedora 17, Rasbian 7)

I apologize for the lack of update, but I've not been feeling well.  I've been playing with my new Raspberry pi, trying to figure out what to do with it first.  Right now, my son and I are learning python together.  I want to be able to back up the pi since I don't particularly trust the SD card as a long term storage medium.  I have a laptop running fedora 17, so as an excercise, I'm going to setup a NFS (network file server) daemon on the laptop and have the raspberry pi running raspbian / wheezy.

First, since this is a lab environment at home and things tend to change around a good bit, I have all the hosts on DHCP for right now.  In production you'd want to have your hosts, especially servers with some sort of static arrangement.  I have long leases on my IP addresses on my internal router, and most of my gear is up at least once a day, so I don't tend to shuffle addresses often.  My Fedora box is named shinigami and my pi is cliffjumper.  This will be slightly confusing because shinigami, as a Fedora machine uses RPM (Redhat Package Manager) commands to install packages, and the Raspbian uses Debian's dpkg (Debian Package) commands.  I'll try to keep it as straightforward as possible.

First, we need to determine what we're going to share, and how.  For illustrative purposes, I'm going to make a space called /local on shinigami that will be shared on both hosts.

[jon@shinigami ~]$ sudo mkdir /local
[jon@shinigami ~]$

Next we want to install the server packages on the Fedora box.

[jon@shinigami ~]$ sudo yum -y install nfs-utils

I happened to already have it installed, so there was nothing of note to do here. Edit the relevant configuration files and start the services. Use whatever editor works best for you, I happen to be a 'vi' guy:

[jon@shinigami ~]$ sudo vi /etc/exports
/local 192.168.0.0/24(rw,sync,no_root_squash,no_all_squash)
[jon@shinigami ~]$ sudo systemctl start rpcbind.service
[jon@shinigami ~]$ sudo systemctl start nfs-server.service
[jon@shinigami ~]$ sudo systemctl start nfs-lock.service
[jon@shinigami ~]$ sudo systemctl start nfs-idmap.service
[jon@shinigami ~]$ sudo systemctl enable rpcbind.service
[jon@shinigami ~]$ sudo systemctl enable nfs-server.service
ln -s '/usr/lib/systemd/system/nfs-server.service' '/etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/nfs-server.service'
[jon@shinigami ~]$ sudo systemctl enable nfs-lock.service
[jon@shinigami ~]$ sudo systemctl enable nfs-idmap.service
ln -s '/usr/lib/systemd/system/nfs-idmap.service' '/etc/systemd/system/nfs.target.wants/nfs-idmap.service'
[jon@shinigami ~]$

The server should be up and running at this point, so we're going to have to setup the client. The following commands are under the Raspbian box:

jon@cliffjumper:~$ sudo apt-get install -y nfs-common portmap

This will install the packages you need to mount the filesystem.

jon@cliffjumper:~$ sudo service rpcbind start
Starting rpcbind daemon....
jon@cliffjumper:~$ sudo update-rc.d rpcbind enable
update-rc.d: using dependency based boot sequencing
jon@cliffjumper:~$ sudo mkdir /local
jon@cliffjumper:~$ sudo mount -t nfs shinigami:/local /local
jon@cliffjumper:~$ cd /local
jon@cliffjumper:/local$ ls -lsa
total 8
4 drwxrwxrwx  2 root root 4096 Jan  9 21:33 .
4 drwxr-xr-x 25 root root 4096 Jan  9 21:32 ..
0 -rw-rw-r--  1 pi   pi      0 Jan  9 21:33 foo
jon@cliffjumper:/local$

At this point you probably have UID mismatches, but at least you're now mounting the fileserver. You'll have all that space now available to the raspberry, but use caution; this method is not particularly secure nor is it particularly robust.