Configure Network File System (NFS) data store

- [Instructor] In some networks you're going to find that both Linux and Windows servers and clients need to be facilitated. When this happens, we can provide multiprotocol access to the same file shares over both the SMB and the NFS, or network file service, protocols. Let's take a look and see how that works. First we need to go into our server manager and click on the "add roles and features" option.

From here we're going to expand our file and storage services and we're going to add the option for NFS. Go ahead and add the features along with it. Click "next" and "install". While we're waiting, let's go ahead and take a look at our file explorer. We could see we created a new folder called Test 2. We've already shared a test folder with the SMB protocol. Now we'll go ahead and set up Test 2 with NFS.

Our installation was successful. Let's go ahead and close and from here we're going to click on "file and storage services" and then click on "shares". Here's our SMB test that we set up earlier. Now let's go ahead and click on "tasks" and "new share". This time we're going to go ahead and click on the "NFS Share - Quick", click "next", and we're going to go to the path of the folder that we created earlier, click "next", and we can see the local path to share is the C:\test2, and the remote path to share is Data:/test2 Go ahead and click "next".

Now we have several different options for the type of authentication that we want and you can certainly take a look at your Linux or Unix clients and decide which type of authentication you would like. Although in this case we're just going to go ahead and choose "no server authentication". Of course that doesn't provide the type of security you may need but for the testing purposes you can see that it's very easy to create and go ahead and choose the "unmapped access users" and "allow anonymous access" to continue.

Otherwise, you need to find out what type of authentication your client supports and then check the appropriate Kerberos options above. Click "next". We're going to get a message saying that everyone will be able to access this, are you sure this is okay? Yes it is. Now we're going to go ahead and click on "add" and even though we've allowed anonymous access, we are also going to allow which IP address or IP addresses we're going to allow to access our shares.

So you can put in the IP address of the host or a netgroup or a client group, but in our case we're just going to go ahead and choose "all machines". Again, not the best security but for testing purposes this is how we're going to set it up. Then we're going to go click on "share permissions" and here you can set which one you would like. You can see Linux and Unix only has a few different options unlike Windows which has many different options so we're just going to go ahead and choose the "read/write" which is the same as full access.

We could also check the box for "allow root access" as well which would allow the remote clients to have full administrator access into our share. Go ahead and click "add". "Next". You can also customize the permissions if you'd like. You could see that we've got users and we've got administrators. All have various different access into this so we don't need to make any changes at this time. Let's go ahead and click "okay", and "next", and "create", and we can see that our share was successfully created.

And if you take a look at the protocol, you can see that there is an NFS share for test 2 and and SMB share for test. If we'd like, we can go back in and create another NFS share for our original test folder so that way the test folder will have both SMB and NFS shares so both Windows and Linux or Unix clients can access the share. If you'd like to take a look at the advanced option, we can click on "new share" and choose the advanced option.

However, it does stop us at this point because it says that we don't have the file server resource manager installed. So what that allows us to do is to choose classifications of data in the folder and access policies and enable quotas. This isn't required to create an NFS share, only to choose these advanced options so we won't do that in this particular case, although we will be enabling file server resource manager in a future upcoming video.

We have now remoted into a Linux client and from here we opened up a terminal, and we mounted our test 2 into the folder called "NFS mount". And if we open up NFS mount, we should be able to see the directory and the test file that we put inside it. Let's go to the Home button and click on "computer", and we're using CentOS version six, and there is our NFS mount folder, and there is our test file.

So we've now successfully opened an NFS share from a Linux client to our Windows server. Using Unix and Windows in the same environment has gotten a lot easier with the NFS utility on Windows Server 2016.