Manually setup an NFS server#

Warning

Use this as a last resort only on GCP clusters that are very price sensitive. Use Google Filestore as default instead.

This guide describes the manual steps required for setting up a NFS server to store users’ home directories on the hub. More information about the NFS Server can be found in User home directory storage.

Deploy the host Virtual Machine#

We need to first deploy a small virtual machine with a persistent disk that will host the NFS server. You can use gcloud commands to achieve this.

Note

To find the values of --image and --image-project, run the following:

gcloud compute images list

Add | grep ubuntu to filter for Ubuntu images.

You can then check the image suits your needs by running:

gcloud computer images describe IMAGE_NAME --project=IMAGE_PROJECT

gcloud compute instances create nfs-server-01 \
  --image=ubuntu-2004-focal-v20210720 \
  --image-project=ubuntu-os-cloud \
  --machine-type=g1-small \
  --boot-disk-device-name=nfs-server-01 \
  --boot-disk-size=100GB \
  --boot-disk-type=pd-standard

Note

The boot disk is where users’ home directories and data are stored. Feel free to increase --boot-disk-size if 100GB won’t be enough.

Note

If deploying a NFS server for a private cluster, add the --no-address flag to the gcloud compute instances create command. This will prevent the VM trying to claim an external IP address, which will not be allowed within the private configuration.

Setting up the NFS Server#

Once your VM has been deployed, SSH into it so we can configure the NFS server.

gcloud compute ssh nfs-server-01

Note

If the cluster you are setting up the NFS for is private, you will need to add the --tunnel-through-iap flag to the above command. This is because the VM will not have an external IP address and will therefore need to be routed differently.

  1. Install the dependencies

    sudo apt update
sudo apt install nfs-kernel-server nfs-common

  2. Create the appropriate directory

    sudo mkdir -p /export/home-01/homes

  3. Set the appropriate permissions on the directory

    sudo chmod -R 0755 /export/
sudo chown -R 1000:1000 /export/

  4. Create the exports rule in the file /etc/exports

    sudo nano /etc/exports  # Create the file

    /export/home-01 10.0.0.0/8(all_squash,anonuid=1000,anongid=1000,no_subtree_check,rw,sync)  # Add this line to the bottom of the file

  5. Run the export command

    sudo exportfs -ra