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Mounting Remote Filesystems

Updated Mar 21, 2021 ·

Remote Filesystems​

For this topic, I didn't actually create the lab since I don't have any remote filesystem set up. However, the steps remain the same theoretically. Let's consider an example where we have a remote NFS filesystem with the following details:

  • Name: NFS-Share
  • IP: 192.168.123.123
  • Filesystem: nfs
  • Mountpoint: We want to mount it to /mnt/disknfs

The steps to mount it would be as follows:

  1. Install the necessary NFS utilities on your machine.
  2. Create a credentials file containing the credentials required to access the remote filesystem.
  3. Add the NFS details to your /etc/fstab.
  4. Use mount -a to scan the fstab and mount all entries.

Example /etc/fstab entry:

//192.168.123.123/NFS-Share     /mnt/disknfs    nfs     credentials=/mnt/.credentialsfile   defaults    0 0

To mount it:

sudo mount -a

To verify the mount:

df -h

Diagnosing Filesystem Problems​

During system boot, filesystem checks are performed on each mountpoint in /mnt, typically every 180 days. For diagnosing filesystem issues and performing a general health check on our disks, we can use the filesystem consistency check tool, fsck.

Example of scanning an unmounted disk:

sudo fsck /dev/xvdf1

Note: fsck cannot be run on mounted disks.