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Enable NFS on your Synology NAS

In a previous post, I wrote about the steps I followed when enabling SSH, SCP/SFTP and configuring a static IP address on my Synology NAS.

In this post, I’ll walk you through the steps I followed when enabling NFS on my Synology NAS.

Enabling Services

Login to the Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM) from your web browser (you can find the IP address, for example, 192.168.1.100 on your router’s status page):

http://<IP-ADDRESS>:5000/

And, navigate to the Control Panel:

Enable NFS

Click on ‘File Services’ and on the ‘Win/Mac/NFS’ tab check the box next to Enable NFS and check the box next to Enable NFSv4 support:

Click the Apply button to save the settings.

Assign NFS Permissions to Shared Folders

Before accessing any shared folders with your NFS client, you must first configure the NFS permissions of the shared folder you wish to access. In the Control Panel click on ‘Shared Folder’ then select the shared folder you want to access and click the Edit button:

On the ‘NFS Permissions’ tab click the Create button:

Edit the NFS rules to suit your configuration:

I want all hosts on my home network to be able to access the shared folder so I used a wildcard (‘*’) for the ‘Hostname or IP’ field. Click the OK button to save your settings:

The mount path (i.e., /volume1/documents) is displayed on the bottom left of the screen.

Note: Don’t forget to grant your users permissions to the shared folder:

Mounting Shared Folders via NFS

I’m using Elementary OS Freya (running in VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro) so I needed to install the required packages for the NFSv4 client:

sudo apt install nfs-common

We can use the showmount command to query the mount daemon (NFS Server):

showmount -e nas-1

You should see output like:

Export list for nas-1:
/volume1/documents *

Note: nas-1 (the static IP address: 192.168.1.100) is configured in my /etc/hosts file.

Now we can mount the shared folder:

sudo mount nas-1:/volume1/documents /mnt

We can use the df (disk free) command to confirm that we have successfully mounted the shared folder:

Filesystem                1K-blocks      Used  Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1                  61796348  24567160   34067076  42% /
...
nas-1:/volume1/documents 5621463168 307087744 5314375424   6% /mnt

Or the Elementary OS File Manager:

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