Subject: [nfsv4] Questions about NFS deamons

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2008 01:08:06 -0300 (BRT)

Hello all,

I really want to understand how NFS deamons works. Please, I need your help.

What's the function of the deamon mountd (or rpc.mountd)? How it works?

Meet all requests of NFS clients for mounting filesystems ?
Mountd don't "speak" with clients directly  but through the nfsd (another
deamon)? So, nfsd get clients requests and pass to mountd? Mountd only
meets nfsd requests ?

How nfsd and mountd interacts?

Thank you very much,

Matheus Salcedo

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From: Rick Macklem <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:52:46 -0400 (EDT)

> I really want to understand how NFS deamons works. Please, I need your help.
This is implementation specific, but I'll try and give generic answers
that, hopefully, won't be too inaccurate for most nfs servers.

> What's the function of the deamon mountd (or rpc.mountd)? How it works?
Typically, it talks a separate protocol (the mount protocol) for NFSv2 and
NFSv3 clients (this protocol is no longer used for NFSv4). On some
implementations it also handles the exporting file systems, by maintaining
a database of what is exported and informing the kernel of these exports
via a system call.

> Meet all requests of NFS clients for mounting filesystems ?
See above. For NFSv2 and v3, a client normally talks to mountd first, via 
the mount protocol, in order to acquire an exported file handle for the
mount point. After that, the client uses the nfs protocol.

> deamon)? So, nfsd get clients requests and pass to mountd? Mountd only
Nope, see above.

> How nfsd and mountd interacts?
There is very little. The nfsd uses the exported file system information 
and that might have been set up by the mountd daemon.

For NFSv4, there is no mount protocol, so a mountd daemon may not be 
needed at all. (If it is needed for an implementation, it will probably
be related to setting up the exported file system information.)

rick