Setting up NFS shares

A Network File System (NFS) is a great method of sharing files from a Linux or UNIX server to a Linux or UNIX server. As I mentioned earlier in the chapter, Windows systems can access NFS shares as well, but there may be an additional licensing penalty if you need to upgrade to a different release. NFS is preferred in a Linux or UNIX environment though, since it fully supports Linux- and UNIX-style permissions. As you can see from our earlier dive into Samba, we essentially forced all shares to be treated as being accessed by a particular user, which was messy, but was the easiest example of setting up a Samba server. Samba can certainly support per-user access restrictions and benefit greatly from a centralized directory server, though that would basically be a book of its own! NFS is a bit more involved to set up, but in the long run, I think it's...