I caught the following tweet from Christian this morning and thought I do a quick blog post on how to mount an external volume like a CIFS or NFS share on VMware's Photon OS.
Hm, anyone tried to get CIFS mount-points
in Photon?— Christian Mohn™ (@h0bbel) January 12, 2016
For mounting an NFS volume, an NFS client is required and this is provided through the nfs-utils package which is not installed by default on Photon OS. To install the package, you just simply need to run the following command:
tdnf -y install nfs-utils cifs-utils
Once the nfs-utils is installed, you can mount your NFS volume by using the mount command like the following:
mount -t nfs [NFS-SERVER]:/path/to/share /mountpoint
If you want to ensure the volume is automatically mounted, you will need to add an entry to /etc/fstab. If you want more details, you can perform a quick Google search for further instructions
For mounting a CIFS or SMB volume, you need to install cifs-utils package and then specify the "cifs" mount type like the following:
mount -t cifs //[CIFS-SERVER]//path/to/share /mountpoint
If you require authentication to your CIFS or SMB volume, you just need to specify -o username=[USERNAME],password=[PASSWORD]
Lastly, I also want to mention that the instructions above is not specific to Photon OS but applies to any other *Nix platform.
Hi there!
I have been able to mount a nfs share successfully thanks to your blog article. Thank you for that.
But I am unable to unmount the nfs share I've mounted before because the command unmount does not exist. Is there a way to remove the mount with a different command?
Hello,
i'm using the latest photon version and i'm getting the following error:
Failed to start rpc-statd.service: Unit rpc-statd.service failed to load: No such file or directory.
mount.nfs: rpc.statd is not running but is required for remote locking.
mount.nfs: Either use '-o nolock' to keep locks local, or start statd.
mount.nfs: an incorrect mount option was specified
tried doing tdnf statd ..there's no package available .
Would appreciate your help.
Thanks!
Hi William - would you mind updating this post for Photon OS 3.0, which actually does NOT natively include the CIFS helper:
tdnf install -y cifs-utils is required - and suddenly all problems melt away!
Updated
Thank you, William. For this - and for everything else 🙂
Thank you for this article. Unfortunately, it helps me only half.
We have 2 vcsa running here and on one machine there are no problems with SMB mounts, the cifs kernel module is loaded and all is well. On the other machine I installed the cifs-utils package via tdnf, but the kernel module is not loaded and thus no mount to an SMB share is possible.
What am I doing wrong? What else can I try?
Hahaha ... I managed to do it myself. I actually only had to do a mount on the command line. But that was only possible after a reboot.
William,
I have tanzu setup and would like to connect to an nfs share. I tried the technique above but it hangs right away:
```
vmware-system-user@root-worker-ls65g-6d97998b66-787cm [ /etc/yum.repos.d ]$ sudo tdnf search wireguard
Refreshing metadata for: 'VMware Photon Extras 3.0 (x86_64)'
retrying 1/10
```
I can do 'curl https://www.google.com' from there so I know connectivity is good. Is there a trick to get the install to work on a tanzu workernode?
I realized nfs was already available as the 'nfs' type (it wasn't working for other reasons, but I got it to work), but would also like to enable wireguard module, so question still stands.