I hope that you have found this chapter both intense and useful. There has been a lot of content to cover that has been made complicated by the need to cover both NFSv4 and NFSv3. Similar to most technologies, legacy clients need to be supported for some time. The great advantage this gave us was diagnosing firewall issues and using tcpdump in anger.

The main point with NFS and firewalling is to use NFSv4 wherever possible because we then only need to open the one static port: the TCP port 2049. For NFSv3, we need to assign static ports and often need to open both UDP and TCP ports to each protocol, depending on the client that connects.

Finishing the chapter on autofs is a real high note because this is so simple and effective to use, auto-creating directories and mounting them as required. What more could we wish for!

In the next chapter, we will stay with file sharing, but investigate sharing to Windows systems using Samba 4.