Components of NFS

NFS consists of commands and daemons and also uses certain administration files:

Administration files	Commands	Daemons
/etc/mnttab /etc/rmtab /etc/vfstab /etc/dfs/dfstab /etc/dfs/fstypes /etc/dfs/sharetab	dfsmounts dfsshares mount, mountall nfsstat share, shareall showmount umount, umountall unshare, unshareall	biod mountd nfsd pcnfsd statd lockdsrv lockdclnt

Commands

NFS offers commands which make available (share) local resources, mount remote resources, or output information about shared or mounted resources.

The commands mount, mountall and umount, umountall are contained in their basic form in POSIX-BC. With NFS, these commands can be used with additional options and/or with NFS-specific functionality.

Daemons

Daemons are system processes which run permanently and normally in the background, and perform universal tasks. The NFS daemons coordinate the operations taking place over the network, such as mounting and the input/output actions. The NFS daemons are started automatically when NFS starts.

Administration files

The administration files support the management of resources. They contain either information for the user which is output by means of commands, or information for commands which either the user or commands entered in these files.

RPC (remote procedure call)

NFS uses remote procedure calls (RPCs) for network communication. To this end, the rpcbind daemon and the rpcinfo program are supplied with POSIX-BC. The rpcbind daemon determines the addresses of the communications partners. The rpcinfo program gives information about the connections, transport routes, programs etc. which are used in the network communication.