NFS Notes

Sat Jan 22 20:18:23 EST 2005

Notes on using NFS for a backup -- I always forget how to do this
and have to mudge around 'till I remember.

1. On server: portmap must be running.  On Slackware this is
rpc.portmap.  Under 9.0 is is started in rc.inet2.

The daemons for NFS, and there are a bunch, are started by rc.nfsd.
I like to make this non-executable when I am not needing NFS.

The config file for NFS is /etc/exports here is a sample:
(exporting the /tmp directory, where I like to store backups, so i don't
end up backing them up...)

# See exports(5) for a description.
# This file contains a list of all directories exported to other computers.
# It is used by rpc.nfsd and rpc.mountd.
/tmp	192.168.100.129(rw) localhost(rw) 192.168.100.138(rw) 

2. on client (running Knoppix?) you have to start portmap before you
can mount. On Knoppix, this is /sbin/portmap.  On slack 10.0 
it is /sbin/rpc.portmap.

mount looks like:

mount nfs-server-name:/share-name /mnt/somemount-point

on Knoppix don't use /mnt/cdrom or /mnt/floppy as the are symlinks
to automounter...

tar command: tar -cvjf your-mountpoint/tarball.tbz dir2backup

Wed Dec 20 21:22:56 EST 2006

I don't do this with NFS anymore.

First alternative: nc

After _Forensic Discovery_ by Farmer and Venema, p 63

receiver$ nc -l -p 1234 > /some/path/mondo-tarball.tbz

sender#  tar -cvj dir2backup | nc -w 1 receiving-host 1234

Second alternative: rsync 

rsync -avz user@host2backup:/path/2/files/2/backup/ \
    /archive/path

This example is run from the host storing the backups.  Presumably
more trusted.  Can be done the other way too.

-avz for archive, verbose and use compression.

Trailing slash, as shown on the first arg, prevents creating the
directory backup in /archive/path.  

Third alternative: ssh.

ssh host2backup tar -cvj dir2backup \
    >/some/path/mondo-tarball.tbz
				 
nc is faster (but less secure) than ssh, also doesn't require the
backed up host to be running sshd.

rsync is good for repetitive backups, say freshening a copy of a
server.  Note that rsync uses ssh transport by default.

ssh is simpler to run than nc and provides encryption.
NFS Notes

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