NFS-Ganesha For Linux

NFS-Ganesha is a completely free, easy to install, easy to configure, multiplatform and open source command-line software project, a daemon that implementes a Network File System (NFS) server on any GNU/Linux or BSD operating systems.

While the software runs completely in User Space, it supports version 3, 4.0 and 4.1 of Parallel NFS (pNFS), as well as the 9P protocol from the Plan9 operating system. All these protocols are supported concurrently by NFS-Ganesha.

The software has been designed with two goals in mind, to provide NFS exports to several namespaces and filesystems, and to provides very large data caches and metadata. It supports the NFS v3, NFS 4.0, NFS 4.1 (including pNFS) protocols.

The software is engineered in such a way that it can use dedicated backend modules called FSAL (File System Abstraction Layer). Among the available FSAL modules, we can mention FSAL/POSIX, FSAL/SNMP, FSAL/PROXY, and FSAL/FUSELIKE.

To install the NFS-Ganesha software on your GNU/Linux operating system, you must first download the latest release from either Softpedia or the project’ official website (see the homepage link at the end of the article), save the archive somewhere on your PC (preferably your Home directory) and use an archive manager to extract its contents.

Open a Terminal app, go to the location where you have extracted the archive file (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/nfs-ganesha-2.1.0-0.1.1-Source - replace ‘softpedia’ with your username), and run the ‘cmake .’ command on the root folder to configure the program.

Then, run the ‘make’ command to compile it and generate the executable, which can be installed system wide by running the ‘make install’ command as root or the ‘sudo make install’ command as a privileged user.