The administrator's role

Your responsibilities as an NFS administrator depend on your site's requirements and the role of your machine on the network. You may be responsible for all the machines on your local network. In this case, you may be responsible for installing the software on every machine, determining which machines, if any, should be dedicated servers, which should act as both servers and clients, and which should be clients only.

If your site has a network administrator, and you are the administrator of a client-only machine, you may be responsible only for mounting and unmounting remote resources on that machine.

Maintaining a machine once it is set up involves the following tasks:

• Starting and stopping NFS operation.

• Sharing and unsharing resources.

• Mounting and unmounting resources.

• Modifying administrative files to update the lists of resources your machine shares and/or mounts automatically.

• Checking the status of the network.

• Diagnosing and fixing NFS-related problems as they arise.

• Setting up maps to use the optional automatic mounting facility, called the Automounter.