Automounting NFS shares in OSX

calendar December 20, 2021 nav_categories Tech nav_tags osx nav_tags nfs nav_tags automount

Trying to get a NFS mount mounted under /Volumes/ in OSX is more difficult than it sounds.

You basically have to trick OSX into allowing you to mount the NFS share in /Volumes/ by using ../ in the directory listing.

Example:

cd /System/Volumes/Data/Volumes

pwd
/System/Volumes/Data/Volumes

Using the ../ trick, which goes to the same directory:

cd /System/Volumes/Data/../Data/Volumes

pwd
/System/Volumes/Data/Volumes

Add the auto_nfs to the /etc/auto_master file:

#
# Automounter master map
#
+auto_master		# Use directory service
#/net			-hosts		-nobrowse,hidefromfinder,nosuid
/home			auto_home	-nobrowse,hidefromfinder
/Network/Servers	-fstab
/-			-static
/-			auto_nfs	-nobrowse,nosuid

Create the /etc/auto_nfs file

With my NFS server being 192.168.1.204, and the NFS share from that server being /mnt/nfsdir2share, this would be the content of the /etc/auto_nfs file:

/System/Volumes/Data/../Data/Volumes/my_mount    -fstype=nfs,noowners,nolockd,resvport,hard,bg,intr,rw,tcp,nfc nfs://192.168.1.204:/mnt/nfsdir2share

Options explained:

  • nfs: Self explanatory

  • noowners: Ignore ownership on this volume.

  • nolockd: All locks will be local and not seen by the server and likewise not seen by other NFS clients for NFSv3 mounts.

  • resvport: Use a reserved socket port number. This flag is obsolete, but on OSX, the mounting will fail without it.

  • hard: Circular explanation from the man page: "Same as not specifying soft".

    soft: A soft mount, which implies that file system calls will fail after retrycnt round trip timeout intervals.

  • bg: If an initial attempt to contact the server fails, fork off a child to keep trying the mount in the background. Useful for fstab, where the file system mount is not critical to multiuser operation.

  • intr: Make the mount interruptible, which implies that file system calls that are delayed due to an unresponsive server will fail with EINTR when a termination signal is posted for the process.

  • rw: Mount with read/write access.

  • tcp: Use TCP transport.

  • nfc: Convert name strings to Unicode Normalization Form C (NFC) when sending them to the NFS server.

You can reboot at this point, and the NFS share will be mounted, or you can use the automount command:

sudo automount -cv
. . .
automount /Volumes/my_mount: mounted

GitHub Gist - osx_automount_nfs.md https://gist.github.com/L422Y/8697518

manpagez: man pages & more - man mount_nfs(8) http://www.manpagez.com/man/8/mount_nfs/osx-10.7.php

FreeBSD Manual Pages https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?mount_nfs(8)

TrueCrypt mount permissions -- noowner https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1798390