Common NFS Mount Options

Beyond mounting a file system via NFS on a remote host, other options can be specified at the
time of the mount to make it easier to use. These options can be used with
manual mount commands, /etc/fstab settings, and autofs.

/device mountpoint FS defaults fsckpass fsck-seq

_netdev,options

The following are options commonly used for NFS mounts:

o fsid=num — Forces the file handle and file attributes settings on the wire to be num,
instead of a number derived from the major and minor number of the block device on the
mounted file system. The value 0has special meaning when used with NFSv4. NFSv4 has a
concept of a root of the overall exported file system. The export point exported
with fsid=0 is used as this root.
o hard or soft — Specifies whether the program using a file via an NFS connection should
stop and wait (hard) for the server to come back online, if the host serving the exported
file system is unavailable, or if it should report an error (soft).

If hard is specified, the user cannot terminate the process waiting for the NFS
communication to resume unless the intr option is also specified.

If soft is specified, the user can set an additional timeo=<value> option,

where <value> specifies the number of seconds to pass before the error is reported.

Note
Using soft mounts is not recommended as they can generate I/O errors in very congested
networks or when using a very busy server.

o intr — Allows NFS requests to be interrupted if the server goes down or cannot be
reached.
o nfsvers=2 or nfsvers=3 — Specifies which version of the NFS protocol to use. This is
useful for hosts that run multiple NFS servers. If no version is specified, NFS uses the
highest supported version by the kernel and mount command. This option is not supported
with NFSv4 and should not be used.
o noacl — Turns off all ACL processing. This may be needed when interfacing with older
versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Linux, or Solaris, since the most recent ACL
technology is not compatible with older systems.
o nolock — Disables file locking. This setting is occasionally required when connecting to
older NFS servers.
o noexec — Prevents execution of binaries on mounted file systems. This is useful if the
system is mounting a non-Linux file system via NFS containing incompatible binaries.
o nosuid — Disables set-user-identifier or set-group-identifier bits. This prevents remote
users from gaining higher privileges by running a setuid program.
o port=num — Specifies the numeric value of the NFS server port. If num is 0 (the default),
then mount queries the remote host's portmapper for the port number to use. If the
 remote host's NFS daemon is not registered with its portmapper, the standard NFS port
number of TCP 2049 is used instead.
o rsize=num and wsize=num — These settings speed up NFS communication for reads
(rsize) and writes (wsize) by setting a larger data block size, in bytes, to be transferred
at one time. Be careful when changing these values; some older Linux kernels and network
cards do not work well with larger block sizes. For NFSv2 or NFSv3, the default values for
both parameters is set to 8192. For NFSv4, the default values for both parameters is set to
32768.
o sec=mode — Specifies the type of security to utilize when authenticating an NFS
connection.

sec=sys is the default setting, which uses local UNIX UIDs and GIDs by means of
AUTH_SYS to authenticate NFS operations.

sec=krb5 uses Kerberos V5 instead of local UNIX UIDs and GIDs to authenticate users.

sec=krb5i uses Kerberos V5 for user authentication and performs integrity checking of
NFS operations using secure checksums to prevent data tampering.

sec=krb5p uses Kerberos V5 for user authentication, integrity checking, and encrypts
NFS traffic to prevent traffic sniffing. This is the most secure setting, but it also has the
most performance overhead involved.

o tcp — Specifies for the NFS mount to use the TCP protocol.
o udp — Specifies for the NFS mount to use the UDP protocol.

Many more options are listed on the mount and nfs man pages.