NFS Services Administrator's Guide (B.11.31.03) August 2008

NFS Servers and Clients
In the NFS context, a system that shares its filesystems over a network is known as a
server, and a system that mounts and accesses these shared filesystems is known as a
client. The NFS service enables a system to access a filesystem located on a remote
system.
Once the filesystem is shared by a server, it can be accessed by a client. Clients access
files on the server by mounting the shared filesystem. For users, these mounted
filesystems appear as a part of the local filesystem.
New Features in NFS
This section discusses the new features that NFS supports on systems running HP-UX
11i v3.
NOTE: All versions of the NFS protocols are supported on HP-UX 11i v3. NFSv4 is
not the default protocol. However, it can be enabled. For information on how to enable
NFSv4, see “Configuring the NFSv4 Server Protocol Version ” (page 29).
NFS Version 4 Protocol (NFSv4)
NFSv4 is an IETF standard protocol that provides the following features:
• Single Protocol
In NFSv4, MOUNT, Network Lock Manager, and the ACL protocols are merged
into the NFS protocol. Merging all these protocols into a single protocol enables
you to configure firewalls easily. All NFSv4 requests are now sent to one port.
In earlier versions of NFS, separate protocols were required to mount a filesystem,
monitor a remote client or a server, lock or unlock a file, and unmount a filesystem.
Configuring a firewall to permit access to specific ports that the protocols listened
on was difficult (or impossible) if the client or the server was part of a firewalled
network.
• COMPOUND Procedure
The COMPOUND procedure decreases transport and security overhead, because
of fewer over-the-wire trips between the client and the server. This feature is
transparent to the user.
NFSv4 uses the COMPOUND RPC procedure to build sequence of requests into
a single RPC. All RPC requests are classified as either NULL or COMPOUND. All
requests that are part of the COMPOUND procedure are known as operations.
An operation is a filesystem action that forms part of a COMPOUND procedure.
NFSv4 currently defines 38 operations.
The server evaluates and processes operations sequentially. If an error is
encountered, it is returned by the server for the entire procedure up to the first
operation that causes the error.
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