NFS Services Administrator's Guide (B.11.31.04) March 2009

implements a lock recovery service used by KLM. It enables rpc.lockd daemon
to recover locks after the NFS service restarts.
Files can be locked using the lockf() or fcntl() system calls. For more
information on daemons and system calls that enable you to lock and synchronize
your files, see lockd(1M), statd(1M), lockf(2), and fcntl(2).
• Remote Procedure Call (RPC) is a mechanism that enables a client application to
communicate with a server application. The NFS protocol uses RPC to communicate
between NFS clients and NFS servers. You can write your own RPC applications
using rpcgen, an RPC compiler that simplifies RPC programming.
Transport-Independent RPC (TI-RPC) is supported on HP-UX 11i v3. For
information on RPC, see rpc(3N) and rpcgen(1). For more information on RPC and
rpcgen, see John Bloomer, Power Programming with RPC.
Network File System (NFS)
The Network File System (NFS) is a distributed filesystem that provides transparent
access to files and directories that are shared by remote systems. It enables you to
centralize the administration of these files and directories. NFS provides a single copy
of the directory that can be shared by all the systems on the network, instead of
duplicating common directories, such as /usr/local on each system.
How NFS works
The NFS environment consists of the following components:
• NFS Services
• NFS Shared Filesystems
• NFS Servers and Clients
NFS Services
The NFS services is a collection of daemons and kernel components, and commands
that enable systems with different architectures running different operating systems
to share filesystems across a network. The physical location of the filesystem does not
affect the NFS services. The NFS services enable you to place a copy of the filesystem
on an NFS server and allow all other systems, or a subset of systems in the network to
access it.
NFS Shared Filesystems
Filesystems that are shared between an NFS server and an NFS client across a network
are known as NFS filesystems. The shared filesystem can refer to an entire file hierarchy,
or a single file.
14 Introduction