How to set up nfs server on centos 7/8, and display content via httpd

Sometimes I need to use fast, simple and no-password storage over the network in bash, or an ISO storage for Xenserver. So nfs sharing is the best way for this.  I have a linux machine with centos 7 and available storage of 1,5TB disk. So, prepare the disk:

fdisk -l /dev/xvdb
> n (new partition), and use default options. The use -t (change partition ID) and change it to 83 (Linux). The use -w (write)
reboot
mkfs.xfs /dev/xvdb1
mkdir /mnt/nfs
mount /dev/xvdb1 /mnt/nfs/

If everything is OK, edit /etc/fstab to automount this partition to ours folder, and add this line:

/dev/xvdb1 /mnt/nfs xfs defaults,nosuid,noatime,nodiratime 0 0

The install package nfs-utils, for nfs server:

yum -y install nfs-utils

And allow nfs service in firewalld:

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=nfs
firewall-cmd --reload
#if sometimes on clients don't working showmount, and it create an error:
showmount -e 11.22.33.44
rpc mount export: RPC: Unable to receive; errno = No route to host
#we must add another ports to firewall:
firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=rpc-bind firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=mountd
firewall-cmd --reload

And uncoment this lines in: /etc/sysconfig/nfs (this is no applicable at Centos 8)

MOUNTD_PORT=892
STATD_PORT=662

Now enable nfs-server to run after poweron server and start it:

systemctl enable nfs-server.service
systemctl start nfs-server.service

Now we must prepare this folder with this permissions, for read and write for everybody: (this is no applicable at Centos 8)

chown nfsnobody:nfsnobody /mnt/nfs/ -R
chmod 755 /mnt/nfs/

And edit file /etc/exports for this folder to by allowed for everybody in network:

/mnt/nfs *(rw,sync,no_root_squash,no_all_squash)

And apply this change:

exportfs -arv

We can see our settings with command “exportfs”:

/mnt/nfs        <world>

And from other linux machine, we can mount this folder:

mount 11.22.33.44:/mnt/nfs /mnt/nfs/
#see this disk report space
df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
11.22.33.44:/mnt/nfs
                      1.5T  200G  1.3T  14% /mnt/nfs

And we can test it with 1GB file:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/nfs/1gb bs=1M count=1000
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 16.4533 s, 63.7 MB/s
...
...
ls -lah /mnt/nfs/
drwxr-xr-x. 18 nfsnobody nfsnobody  4.0K Feb 28 10:47 .
drwxr-xr-x.  3 root      root       4.0K Feb 28 10:24 ..
-rw-r--r--.  1 root      root      1000M Feb 28 10:47 1gb

Now we can continue with installing apache web server:

yum install httpd -y
systemctl enable httpd.service
firewall-cmd --add-service=http --permanent
firewall-cmd --reload

Now, we create an configuration file for one folder from nfs storage:

vim /etc/httpd/conf.d/media.exmaple.com.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin user@example.com
DocumentRoot "/mnt/nfs/kadeco/installs"
ServerName installs.example.com
<Directory "/mnt/nfs/kadeco/installs">
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
Options Indexes
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/installs.example.com-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/httpd/installs.example.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

But we cannot serve this directory:

AH01276: Cannot serve directory /mnt/nfs/kadeco/installs: No matching DirectoryIndex (index.html) found, and server-generated directory index forbidden by Options directive

So, we install som softvare to modify file and folders context with selinux:

yum install setroubleshoot

And change context to this folder:

semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_content_t "/mnt/nfs/kadeco/installs(/.*)?"
restorecon -R /mnt/nfs/kadeco/installs
rm /etc/httpd/conf.d/welcome.conf
systemctl restart httpd.service

Have a fun 🙂

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