Mounting File Systems Automatically With; Etc/Fstab - Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 3 - INTRODUCTION TO SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION Administration Manual

Chapter 5. Managing Storage
5.9.4. Network-Accessible Storage Under Red Hat Enterprise Linux
There are two major technologies used for implementing network-accessible storage under Red Hat
Enterprise Linux:
NFS
•
SMB
•
The following sections describe these technologies.
5.9.4.1. NFS
As the name implies, the Network File System (more commonly known as NFS) is a file system that
may be accessed via a network connection. With other file systems, the storage device must be directly
attached to the local system. However, with NFS this is not a requirement, making possible a variety
of different configurations, from centralized file system servers to entirely diskless computer systems.
However, unlike the other file systems, NFS does not dictate a specific on-disk format. Instead, it
relies on the server operating system's native file system support to control the actual I/O to local disk
drive(s). NFS then makes the file system available to any operating system running a compatible NFS
client.
While primarily a Linux and UNIX technology, it is worth noting that NFS client implementations
exist for other operating systems, making NFS a viable technique to share files with a variety of
different platforms.
The file systems an NFS server makes available to clients is controlled by the configuration file
. For more information, see the
/etc/exports
Linux System Administration Guide.
5.9.4.2. SMB
SMB stands for Server Message Block and is the name for the communications protocol used by
various operating systems produced by Microsoft over the years. SMB makes it possible to share
storage across a network. Present-day implementations often use TCP/IP as the underlying transports;
previously NetBEUI was the transport.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports SMB via the Samba server program. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux
System Administration Guide includes information on configuring Samba.

5.9.5. Mounting File Systems Automatically with

When a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system is newly-installed, all the disk partitions defined and/or
created during the installation are configured to be automatically mounted whenever the system boots.
However, what happens when additional disk drives are added to a system after the installation is
done? The answer is "nothing" because the system was not configured to mount them automatically.
However, this is easily changed.
The answer lies in the
when the system boots, as well as to supply default values for other file systems that may be mounted
manually from time to time. Here is a sample
LABEL=/
/dev/sda1
/dev/cdrom
/dev/homedisk
/dev/sda2
file. This file is used to control what file systems are mounted

/etc/fstab

/
/boot
/mnt/cdrom
/home
swap
man page and the Red Hat Enterprise
exports(5)
/etc/fstab
file:
/etc/fstab
ext3 defaults
ext3 defaults
iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
ext3 defaults
swap defaults
99
1 1
1 2
1 2
0 0