By default Windows doesn’t allow you to mount an NFS based volume through explorer on a Windows client. Because a customer of mine was struggling to mount their ANF volume to an NFS client running on a Windows OS via the explorer and via the command prompt
So i wanted to test this on our lab environment on Azure and take you through this step by step.
Assumption is that there is already a Capacity pool (regardless of the tier) and a volume with a name.
For this blog i created “verron01” as volume name and a folder called “volume-verron”
Also you want to make sure that your Windows OS has a client for NFS installed
Step 1 – Mounting your FileSystem
Create a new directory on your Azure instance, in this case via a Linux Server:
sudo mkdir volume-test
Step 2 – Select the mount target IP address
In this case : 12.0.1.4
Step 3 – Mount your file system using the command/s below
sudo mount -t nfs -o rw,hard,rsize=1048576,wsize=1048576,vers=3,tcp 12.0.1.4:/volume-test volume-testStep 4 – Map Network Drive in Explorer – First attempt
This will not work because we don’t have the right privileges on the volume to execute this.
Let’s go back to the Linux instance and check what the file permissions are on the mounted volume for the volume-test folder
ls -hal
On the folder/directory level you see we have no rights on the “- – -“. This is broken down in User level (directory, read, write, execute), Group level (read,write and execute) and other (no file permissions)
Step 5 – Provide the correct rights on the right level
To change this we need to use the following command on the Linux instance
sudo chmod 777 volume-test
This provides the RWX access to others. Meaning they can mount the volume and have the ability to delete/create files/folders.
If you want a users to be able to only Read and Write you should use chmod 775 command.
Step 6 – Map Network drive via Windows Explorer – Second attempt
As you see this will fail.
Step 7- Mounting the volume to a drive via command line (CMD)
mount \\12.0.1.4\volume-test Z:
Now the volume is mounted to the Z: drive and visible in Windows Explorer
Please note that the mounted volume will not appear in explorer if you run it from the command prompt as Administrator
Documentation
File Permissions in Linux/Unix with Example
https://www.guru99.com/file-permissions.html
Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash