mountd(8) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | CONFIGURATION FILE | TCP_WRAPPERS SUPPORT | FILES | SEE ALSO | AUTHOR | COLOPHON

rpc.mountd(8)            System Manager's Manual           rpc.mountd(8)

NAME         top

       rpc.mountd - NFS mount daemon

SYNOPSIS         top

       /usr/sbin/rpc.mountd [options]

DESCRIPTION         top

       The rpc.mountd daemon implements the server side of the NFS MOUNT
       protocol, an NFS side protocol used by NFS version 2 [RFC1094]
       and NFS version 3 [RFC1813].

       An NFS server maintains a table of local physical file systems
       that are accessible to NFS clients.  Each file system in this
       table is referred to as an exported file system, or export, for
       short.

       Each file system in the export table has an access control list.
       rpc.mountd uses these access control lists to determine whether
       an NFS client is permitted to access a given file system.  For
       details on how to manage your NFS server's export table, see the
       exports(5) and exportfs(8) man pages.

   Mounting exported NFS File Systems
       The NFS MOUNT protocol has several procedures.  The most
       important of these are MNT (mount an export) and UMNT (unmount an
       export).

       A MNT request has two arguments: an explicit argument that
       contains the pathname of the root directory of the export to be
       mounted, and an implicit argument that is the sender's IP
       address.

       When receiving a MNT request from an NFS client, rpc.mountd
       checks both the pathname and the sender's IP address against its
       export table.  If the sender is permitted to access the requested
       export, rpc.mountd returns an NFS file handle for the export's
       root directory to the client.  The client can then use the root
       file handle and NFS LOOKUP requests to navigate the directory
       structure of the export.

   The rmtab File
       The rpc.mountd daemon registers every successful MNT request by
       adding an entry to the /var/lib/nfs/rmtab file.  When receivng a
       UMNT request from an NFS client, rpc.mountd simply removes the
       matching entry from /var/lib/nfs/rmtab, as long as the access
       control list for that export allows that sender to access the
       export.

       Clients can discover the list of file systems an NFS server is
       currently exporting, or the list of other clients that have
       mounted its exports, by using the showmount(8) command.
       showmount(8) uses other procedures in the NFS MOUNT protocol to
       report information about the server's exported file systems.

       Note, however, that there is little to guarantee that the
       contents of /var/lib/nfs/rmtab are accurate.  A client may
       continue accessing an export even after invoking UMNT.  If the
       client reboots without sending a UMNT request, stale entries
       remain for that client in /var/lib/nfs/rmtab.

OPTIONS         top

       -d kind  or  --debug kind
              Turn on debugging. Valid kinds are: all, auth, call,
              general and parse.

       -F  or  --foreground
              Run in foreground (do not daemonize)

       -h  or  --help
              Display usage message.

       -o num  or  --descriptors num
              Set the limit of the number of open file descriptors to
              num. The default is to leave the limit unchanged.

       -N mountd-version  or  --no-nfs-version mountd-version
              This option can be used to request that rpc.mountd do not
              offer certain versions of NFS. The current version of
              rpc.mountd can support both NFS version 2, 3 and 4. If the
              either one of these version should not be offered,
              rpc.mountd must be invoked with the option --no-nfs-
              version <vers> .

       -n  or  --no-tcp
              Don't advertise TCP for mount.

       -p num  or  -P num  or  --port num
              Specifies the port number used for RPC listener sockets.
              If this option is not specified, rpc.mountd will try to
              consult /etc/services, if gets port succeed, set the same
              port for all listener socket, otherwise chooses a random
              ephemeral port for each listener socket.

              This option can be used to fix the port value of
              rpc.mountd's listeners when NFS MOUNT requests must
              traverse a firewall between clients and servers.

       -H  prog or  --ha-callout prog
              Specify a high availability callout program.  This program
              receives callouts for all MOUNT and UNMOUNT requests.
              This allows rpc.mountd to be used in a High Availability
              NFS (HA-NFS) environment.

              The callout program is run with 4 arguments.  The first is
              mount or unmount depending on the reason for the callout.
              The second will be the name of the client performing the
              mount.  The third will be the path that the client is
              mounting.  The last is the number of concurrent mounts
              that we believe the client has of that path.

              This callout is not needed with 2.6 and later kernels.
              Instead, mount the nfsd filesystem on /proc/fs/nfsd.

       -s, --state-directory-path directory
              Specify a directory in which to place state information
              (etab and rmtab).  If this option is not specified the
              default of /var/lib/nfs is used.

       -r, --reverse-lookup
              rpc.mountd tracks IP addresses in the rmtab file.  When a
              DUMP request is made (by someone running showmount -a, for
              instance), it returns IP addresses instead of hostnames by
              default. This option causes rpc.mountd to perform a
              reverse lookup on each IP address and return that hostname
              instead.  Enabling this can have a substantial negative
              effect on performance in some situations.

       -t N or --num-threads=N or --num-threads N
              This option specifies the number of worker threads that
              rpc.mountd spawns.  The default is 1 thread, which is
              probably enough.  More threads are usually only needed for
              NFS servers which need to handle mount storms of hundreds
              of NFS mounts in a few seconds, or when your DNS server is
              slow or unreliable.

       -u  or  --no-udp
              Don't advertise UDP for mounting

       -V version  or  --nfs-version version
              This option can be used to request that rpc.mountd offer
              certain versions of NFS. The current version of rpc.mountd
              can support both NFS version 2 and the newer version 3.

       -v  or  --version
              Print the version of rpc.mountd and exit.

       -g  or  --manage-gids
              Accept requests from the kernel to map user id numbers
              into  lists of group id numbers for use in access control.
              An NFS request will normally (except when using Kerberos
              or other cryptographic authentication) contains a user-id
              and a list of group-ids.  Due to a limitation in the NFS
              protocol, at most 16 groups ids can be listed.  If you use
              the -g flag, then the list of group ids received from the
              client will be replaced by a list of group ids determined
              by an appropriate lookup on the server. Note that the
              'primary' group id is not affected so a newgroup command
              on the client will still be effective.  This function
              requires a Linux Kernel with version at least 2.6.21.

CONFIGURATION FILE         top

       Many of the options that can be set on the command line can also
       be controlled through values set in the [mountd] or, in some
       cases, the [nfsd] sections of the /etc/nfs.conf configuration
       file.  Values recognized in the [mountd] section include manage-
       gids, descriptors, port, threads, reverse-lookup, and state-
       directory-path, ha-callout which each have the same effect as the
       option with the same name.

       The values recognized in the [nfsd] section include TCP, UDP,
       vers2, vers3, and vers4 which each have same same meaning as
       given by rpc.nfsd(8).

TCP_WRAPPERS SUPPORT         top

       You can protect your rpc.mountd listeners using the tcp_wrapper
       library or iptables(8).

       Note that the tcp_wrapper library supports only IPv4 networking.

       Add the hostnames of NFS peers that are allowed to access
       rpc.mountd to /etc/hosts.allow.  Use the daemon name mountd even
       if the rpc.mountd binary has a different name.

       Hostnames used in either access file will be ignored when they
       can not be resolved into IP addresses.  For further information
       see the tcpd(8) and hosts_access(5) man pages.

   IPv6 and TI-RPC support
       TI-RPC is a pre-requisite for supporting NFS on IPv6.  If TI-RPC
       support is built into rpc.mountd, it attempts to start listeners
       on network transports marked 'visible' in /etc/netconfig.  As
       long as at least one network transport listener starts
       successfully, rpc.mountd will operate.

FILES         top

       /etc/exports
              input file for exportfs, listing exports, export options,
              and access control lists

       /var/lib/nfs/rmtab
              table of clients accessing server's exports

SEE ALSO         top

       exportfs(8), exports(5), showmount(8), rpc.nfsd(8),
       rpc.rquotad(8), nfs(5), nfs.conf(5), tcpd(8), hosts_access(5),
       iptables(8), netconfig(5)

       RFC 1094 - "NFS: Network File System Protocol Specification"
       RFC 1813 - "NFS Version 3 Protocol Specification"

AUTHOR         top

       Olaf Kirch, H. J. Lu, G. Allan Morris III, and a host of others.

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the nfs-utils (NFS utilities) project.
       Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨http://linux-nfs.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page⟩.  If you have a
       bug report for this manual page, see
       ⟨http://linux-nfs.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page⟩.  This page was
       obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨http://git.linux-nfs.org/?p=steved/nfs-utils.git;a=summary⟩ on
       2020-12-18.  (At that time, the date of the most recent commit
       that was found in the repository was 2020-12-16.)  If you
       discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page,
       or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for
       the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the
       information in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original
       manual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org

                               31 Dec 2009                 rpc.mountd(8)

Pages that refer to this page: exports(5)nfs.conf(5)nfsd(7)exportfs(8)mount(8)nfsd(8)showmount(8)