mountd(8) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | CONFIGURATION FILE | TCP_WRAPPERS SUPPORT | FILES | SEE ALSO | AUTHOR | COLOPHON

rpc.mountd(8)            System Manager's Manual           rpc.mountd(8)

NAME         top

       rpc.mountd - NFS mount daemon

SYNOPSIS         top

       /usr/sbin/rpc.mountd [options]

DESCRIPTION         top

       The rpc.mountd daemon implements the server side of the NFS MOUNT
       protocol, an NFS side protocol used by NFS version 2 [RFC1094]
       and NFS version 3 [RFC1813].  It also responds to requests from
       the Linux kernel to authenticate clients and provides details of
       access permissions.

       The NFS server (nfsd) maintains a cache of authentication and
       authorization information which is used to identify the source of
       each request, and then what access permissions that source has to
       any local filesystem.  When required information is not found in
       the cache, the server sends a request to mountd to fill in the
       missing information.  Mountd uses a table of information stored
       in /var/lib/nfs/etab and maintained by exportfs(8), possibly
       based on the contents of exports(5), to respond to each request.

   Mounting exported NFS File Systems
       The NFS MOUNT protocol has several procedures.  The most
       important of these are MNT (mount an export) and UMNT (unmount an
       export).

       A MNT request has two arguments: an explicit argument that
       contains the pathname of the root directory of the export to be
       mounted, and an implicit argument that is the sender's IP
       address.

       When receiving a MNT request from an NFS client, rpc.mountd
       checks both the pathname and the sender's IP address against its
       export table.  If the sender is permitted to access the requested
       export, rpc.mountd returns an NFS file handle for the export's
       root directory to the client.  The client can then use the root
       file handle and NFS LOOKUP requests to navigate the directory
       structure of the export.

   The rmtab File
       The rpc.mountd daemon registers every successful MNT request by
       adding an entry to the /var/lib/nfs/rmtab file.  When receivng a
       UMNT request from an NFS client, rpc.mountd simply removes the
       matching entry from /var/lib/nfs/rmtab, as long as the access
       control list for that export allows that sender to access the
       export.

       Clients can discover the list of file systems an NFS server is
       currently exporting, or the list of other clients that have
       mounted its exports, by using the showmount(8) command.
       showmount(8) uses other procedures in the NFS MOUNT protocol to
       report information about the server's exported file systems.

       Note, however, that there is little to guarantee that the
       contents of /var/lib/nfs/rmtab are accurate.  A client may
       continue accessing an export even after invoking UMNT.  If the
       client reboots without sending a UMNT request, stale entries
       remain for that client in /var/lib/nfs/rmtab.

   Mounting File Systems with NFSv4
       Version 4 (and later) of NFS does not use a separate NFS MOUNT
       protocol.  Instead mounting is performed using regular NFS
       requests handled by the NFS server in the Linux kernel (nfsd).
       Consequently /var/lib/nfs/rmtab is not updated to reflect any
       NFSv4 activity.

OPTIONS         top

       -d kind  or  --debug kind
              Turn on debugging. Valid kinds are: all, auth, call,
              general and parse.

       -l or --log-auth
              Enable logging of responses to authentication and access
              requests from nfsd.  Each response is then cached by the
              kernel for 30 minutes (or as set by --ttl below), and will
              be refreshed after 15 minutes (half the ttl time) if the
              relevant client remains active.  Note that -l is
              equivalent to -d auth and so can be enabled in
              /etc/nfs.conf with "debug = auth" in the [mountd] section.

              rpc.mountd will always log authentication responses to
              MOUNT requests when NFSv3 is used, but to get similar logs
              for NFSv4, this option is required.

       -i or --cache-use-ipaddr
              Normally each client IP address is matched against each
              host identifier (name, wildcard, netgroup etc) found in
              /etc/exports and a combined identity is formed from all
              matching identifiers.  Often many clients will map to the
              same combined identity so performing this mapping reduces
              the number of distinct access details that the kernel
              needs to store.  Specifying the -i option suppresses this
              mapping so that access to each filesystem is requested and
              cached separately for each client IP address.  Doing this
              can increase the burden of updating the cache slightly,
              but can make the log messages produced by the -l option
              easier to read.

       -T  or  --ttl
              Provide a time-to-live (TTL) for cached information given
              to the kernel.  The kernel will normally request an update
              if the information is needed after half of this time has
              expired.  Increasing the provided number, which is in
              seconds, reduces the rate of cache update requests, and
              this is particularly noticeable when these requests are
              logged with -l.  However increasing also means that
              changes to hostname to address mappings can take longer to
              be noticed.  The default TTL is 1800 (30 minutes).

       -F  or  --foreground
              Run in foreground (do not daemonize)

       -h  or  --help
              Display usage message.

       -o num  or  --descriptors num
              Set the limit of the number of open file descriptors to
              num. The default is to leave the limit unchanged.

       -N mountd-version  or  --no-nfs-version mountd-version
              This option can be used to request that rpc.mountd do not
              offer certain versions of NFS. The current version of
              rpc.mountd can support both NFS version 2, 3 and 4. If the
              either one of these version should not be offered,
              rpc.mountd must be invoked with the option --no-nfs-
              version <vers> .

       -n  or  --no-tcp
              Don't advertise TCP for mount.

       -p num  or  -P num  or  --port num
              Specifies the port number used for RPC listener sockets.
              If this option is not specified, rpc.mountd will try to
              consult /etc/services, if gets port succeed, set the same
              port for all listener socket, otherwise chooses a random
              ephemeral port for each listener socket.

              This option can be used to fix the port value of
              rpc.mountd's listeners when NFS MOUNT requests must
              traverse a firewall between clients and servers.

       -H  prog or  --ha-callout prog
              Specify a high availability callout program.  This program
              receives callouts for all MOUNT and UNMOUNT requests.
              This allows rpc.mountd to be used in a High Availability
              NFS (HA-NFS) environment.

              The callout program is run with 4 arguments.  The first is
              mount or unmount depending on the reason for the callout.
              The second will be the name of the client performing the
              mount.  The third will be the path that the client is
              mounting.  The last is the number of concurrent mounts
              that we believe the client has of that path.

              This callout is not needed with 2.6 and later kernels.
              Instead, mount the nfsd filesystem on /proc/fs/nfsd.

       -s, --state-directory-path directory
              Specify a directory in which to place state information
              (etab and rmtab).  If this option is not specified the
              default of /var/lib/nfs is used.

       -r, --reverse-lookup
              rpc.mountd tracks IP addresses in the rmtab file.  When a
              DUMP request is made (by someone running showmount -a, for
              instance), it returns IP addresses instead of hostnames by
              default. This option causes rpc.mountd to perform a
              reverse lookup on each IP address and return that hostname
              instead.  Enabling this can have a substantial negative
              effect on performance in some situations.

       -t N or --num-threads=N or --num-threads N
              This option specifies the number of worker threads that
              rpc.mountd spawns.  The default is 1 thread, which is
              probably enough.  More threads are usually only needed for
              NFS servers which need to handle mount storms of hundreds
              of NFS mounts in a few seconds, or when your DNS server is
              slow or unreliable.

       -u  or  --no-udp
              Don't advertise UDP for mounting

       -V version  or  --nfs-version version
              This option can be used to request that rpc.mountd offer
              certain versions of NFS. The current version of rpc.mountd
              can support both NFS version 2 and the newer version 3.

       -v  or  --version
              Print the version of rpc.mountd and exit.

       -g  or  --manage-gids
              Accept requests from the kernel to map user id numbers
              into  lists of group id numbers for use in access control.
              An NFS request will normally (except when using Kerberos
              or other cryptographic authentication) contains a user-id
              and a list of group-ids.  Due to a limitation in the NFS
              protocol, at most 16 groups ids can be listed.  If you use
              the -g flag, then the list of group ids received from the
              client will be replaced by a list of group ids determined
              by an appropriate lookup on the server. Note that the
              'primary' group id is not affected so a newgroup command
              on the client will still be effective.  This function
              requires a Linux Kernel with version at least 2.6.21.

CONFIGURATION FILE         top

       Many of the options that can be set on the command line can also
       be controlled through values set in the [mountd] or, in some
       cases, the [nfsd] sections of the /etc/nfs.conf configuration
       file.  Values recognized in the [mountd] section include manage-
       gids, cache-use-ipaddr, descriptors, port, threads, ttl, reverse-
       lookup, and state-directory-path, ha-callout which each have the
       same effect as the option with the same name.

       The values recognized in the [nfsd] section include TCP, UDP,
       vers3, and vers4 which each have the same meaning as given by
       rpc.nfsd(8).

TCP_WRAPPERS SUPPORT         top

       You can protect your rpc.mountd listeners using the tcp_wrapper
       library or iptables(8).

       Note that the tcp_wrapper library supports only IPv4 networking.

       Add the hostnames of NFS peers that are allowed to access
       rpc.mountd to /etc/hosts.allow.  Use the daemon name mountd even
       if the rpc.mountd binary has a different name.

       Hostnames used in either access file will be ignored when they
       can not be resolved into IP addresses.  For further information
       see the tcpd(8) and hosts_access(5) man pages.

   IPv6 and TI-RPC support
       TI-RPC is a pre-requisite for supporting NFS on IPv6.  If TI-RPC
       support is built into rpc.mountd, it attempts to start listeners
       on network transports marked 'visible' in /etc/netconfig.  As
       long as at least one network transport listener starts
       successfully, rpc.mountd will operate.

FILES         top

       /etc/exports
              input file for exportfs, listing exports, export options,
              and access control lists

       /var/lib/nfs/rmtab
              table of clients accessing server's exports

SEE ALSO         top

       exportfs(8), exports(5), showmount(8), rpc.nfsd(8),
       rpc.rquotad(8), nfs(5), nfs.conf(5), tcpd(8), hosts_access(5),
       iptables(8), netconfig(5)

       RFC 1094 - "NFS: Network File System Protocol Specification"
       RFC 1813 - "NFS Version 3 Protocol Specification"
       RFC 7530 - "Network File System (NFS) Version 4 Protocol"
       RFC 8881 - "Network File System (NFS) Version 4 Minor Version 1
       Protocol"

AUTHOR         top

       Olaf Kirch, H. J. Lu, G. Allan Morris III, and a host of others.

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the nfs-utils (NFS utilities) project.
       Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨http:https://linux-nfs.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page⟩.  If you have a
       bug report for this manual page, see
       ⟨http:https://linux-nfs.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page⟩.  This page was
       obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨git:https://git.linux-nfs.org/projects/steved/nfs-utils.git⟩ on
       2023-12-22.  (At that time, the date of the most recent commit
       that was found in the repository was 2023-12-05.)  If you
       discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page,
       or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for
       the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the
       information in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original
       manual page), send a mail to [email protected]

                               31 Dec 2009                 rpc.mountd(8)

Pages that refer to this page: exports(5)nfs.conf(5)nfsd(7)exportfs(8)mount(8)nfsd(8)showmount(8)