NFS Ganesha is a user-mode file sharing server, which supports NFS 3 and 4.x versions and 9P. NFS Ganesha has several interesting plugins that support exporting files from the cluster and distributed file systems like Ceph and Glusterfs Exporting a file system with NFS Ganesha is simple enough if you do not use SELinux or SELinux is in permissive mode!
This article is to show how to export a server’s directory using NFS protocol Just to note the NFS-Ganesha is tested and supports ext2/ext3/ext4, xfs, brtfs, zfs file systems as of version 3.5 (check the manual for xfs, brtfs and zfs exports – here are sample configurations for them https://github.com/phdeniel/nfs-ganesha/tree/master/src/config_samples). To be able to export a file directory the VFS Ganesha plugin is used. A clean install of minimal CentOS 8 Stream is used so the installation log may differ significantly from the user’s log but the user will see all the dependencies, which are required for this setup.
STEP 1) Install the repository and NFS-Ganesha software
NFS-Ganesha 3 packages are from the CentOS Storage SIG repository, which is a good repository and may be trusted.
dnf install -y centos-release-nfs-ganesha30 dnf install -y nfs-ganesha nfs-ganesha-vfs
STEP 2) Configuration for exporting a directory.
There are two files under /etc/ganesha/:
ganesha.conf vfs.conf
ganesha.conf includes global configuration and NFS share configuration. Each export path begins with the keyword EXPORT followed by a block ebraced by brackets {}.
vfs.conf includes a simple example for the VFS plugin, but this configuration file is not used by the NFS Ganesha server. It is just a sample file.
Here is a simple configuration, which exports /mnt/storage with Read/Write permissions to a single IP. Just add at the end of the file /etc/ganesha/ganesha.conf contains:
EXPORT
{
Export_Id = 2;
Path = /mnt/storage1;
Pseudo = /mnt/storage1;
Protocols = 3,4;
Access_Type = RW;
Squash = None;
FSAL
{
Name = VFS;
}
CLIENT
{
Clients = 192.168.0.12;
}
}
STEP 3) Start the server and mount the exported directory. Configure the firewall.
Start the server, enable the service to start on boot and then configure the firewall to pass the NFS requests:
systemctl start nfs-ganesha systemctl enable nfs-ganesha firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=nfs firewall-cmd --reload