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Network Mounting
Posted: Thursday May 03, 2012 1:05pm

As people who have read some of my previous posts may have noticed (that is, if anyone actually reads these things) that I have two computers to work with. I have a desktop with Ubuntu (which hosts this site) and a laptop with openSUSE (although I'll be changing that soon). I've always hated having to move files back and forth between these computers, because it takes time and causes lots of duplicates of files with old versions laying around everywhere. My solution to this issue was the mount command. For this, I had to edit the /etc/exports file. On the desktop, there is one line:
      /home/curtis     192.168.XXX.XXX(rw,sync,no_root_squash)

Here is a breakdown of what you see here:
/home/curtis      This is the file that I'm letting the laptop mount
192.168.XXX.XXX   This is the laptops IP address (it's static on the network)
rw                This allows the laptop to read and write files
sync              This means that the desktop will not reply to new requests before old requests are dealt with
no_root_squash    The superuser on the laptop gets superuser privileges on the mounted files

The only difference in the laptops version of the file is the IP address.
In looking up the concrete definitions of these options, I have noticed that the sync and no_root_squash options are the defaults (as opposed to async and root_squash, respectively), so they are probably not necessary.

Then I mount by running the following command on my laptop
      sudo mount -t nfs 192.168.XXX.XXX:/home/curtis /mnt/desktop

And here is what it means:
sudo              We don't want just any user doing this, so we get root to do it
mount             The command which is actually doing all the work here
-t nfs            Specifies what type of file system we're dealing with, in this case a Network File System
192.168.XXX.XXX   The IP address of the desktop (again, this is static on the network), this tells mount where to look for the directories
:/home/curtis     This tells mount which directories to look for
/mnt/desktop      This tells mount where on the computer we want to put the files

And now I can see the files from my desktop on my laptop. A similar command is run from my desktop, and it's all good.
This way, I can just edit files directly without having to copy and move them everywhere.

When I'm done, I just run the command
      sudo umount /mnt/desktop
and this takes it off (similar on the desktop).

~curtis



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