Managing NFS servers and file shares

NFS (Network File System) is a protocol to mount a shared directory from a remote server. For example, a pool of web servers might all mount the same NFS share to serve static assets such as images and stylesheets. Although NFS is generally slower and less secure than local storage or a clustered filesystem, the ease with which it can be used makes it a common choice in the datacenter. We'll use our myfw module from before to ensure the local firewall permits nfs communication. We'll also use the Puppet labs-concat module to edit the list of exported filesystems on our nfs server.

How to do it...

In this example, we'll configure an nfs server to share (export) some filesystem via NFS.

1. Create an nfs module with the following nfs::exports class, which defines a concat resource:

   class nfs::exports {
     exec {'nfs::exportfs':
       command     => 'exportfs -a',
       refreshonly => true,
       path        => '/usr/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin',
     }
     concat {...