Linux uses a combination of kernel-level support and continuously running daemon processes to provide NFS file sharing, however, NFS support must be enabled in the Linux kernel in order to function. NFS uses Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) to route requests between clients and servers, meaning that the portmap service must be enabled and active at the proper runlevels for NFS communication to occur. Working with portmap, the following processes ensure that a given NFS connection is allowed and may proceed without error:
NFS and portmap
NFS relies upon remote procedure calls (RPC) to function. The portmap service is required to map RPC requests to the correct services. RPC processes notify portmap when they start, revealing the port number they are monitoring and the RPC program numbers they expect to serve. The client system then contacts portmap on the server with a particular RPC program number. portmap then redirects the client to the proper port number to communicate with its intended service.
Because RPC-based services rely on portmap to make all connections with incoming client requests, portmap must be available before any of these services start. If, for some reason, the portmap service unexpectedly quits, restart portmap and any services running when it was started.
The portmap service can be used with TCP wrappers' hosts access files (/etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny) to control which remote systems are permitted to use RPC-based services on the server. See Chapter 15 TCP Wrappers and xinetd for more information. Access control rules for portmap will affect all RPC-based services. Alternatively, it is possible to specify each of the NFS RPC daemons to be affected by a particular access control rule. The man pages for rpc.mountd and rpc.statd contain information regarding the precise syntax for these rules.
The rpcinfo command shows each RPC-based service with its port number, RPC program number, version, and IP protocol type (TCP or UDP).
o make sure the proper NFS RPC-based services are enabled for portmap, use the rpcinfo -p command:
program vers proto port |
The -p option probes the portmapper on the specified host or defaults to localhost if no specific host is listed. Other options are available from the rpcinfo man page.
From this output, it is apparent that various NFS services are running. If one of the NFS services does not start up correctly, portmap will be unable to map RPC requests from clients for that service to the correct port. In many cases, restarting NFS as root (/sbin/service nfs restart) will cause those service to correctly register with portmap and begin working.
