Network Filesystem

The Network Filesystem (NFS) is a type of distributed filesystem. It is a technology originally created by Sun and now licensed by many other companies. As such, it is supplied as core software with many UNIX operating systems, including Solaris, and is also available on many other non-UNIX computing environments.

NFS is a client-server product that allows data to be transparently accessed by machines across the network. To do this, a server allows access to some of its data. Clients then mount the data on their local filesystem in a way similar to mounting a local disk. Once the data is mounted locally, clients can read and write into the NFS-mounted areas.

NFS is based on Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs), which carry out the underlying reads and writes on behalf of the user.