I don’t know what I’m doing. I poke things until they work. Then, I keep poking them to see if I can make them work better.

In my previous post, I looked at setting up NFS with BSDPy by installing the NFS kernel server. I had tried setting up a Docker container I’d found, namely the fuzzle/docker-nfs-server container, and failed. After doing some more digging, I found the macadmins/unfs3 container that uses the userspace nfs server.

After much faffing, this is how I got a working NFS server. This builds on Graham Gilbert’s guide for BSDPy, Ubuntu and Docker.

If you’ve followed my previous post then you can undo the damage by running (as root):

apt-get remove nfs-kernel-server

Then reboot (to free up TCP/UDP ports 111).

Docker me up!

Now, create an exports file. I put mine in /usr/local/docker/ - the following command will do that (run as root):

echo "/nbi (ro)" >> /usr/local/docker/exports

Next, the following two commands (also run as root) will a) pull down the macadmins/unfs3 container and b) run it, serving up your /nbi folder over NFS.

docker pull macadmins/unfs3

docker run -d \
  --privileged \
  -p 0.0.0.0:111:111/udp \
  -p 0.0.0.0:111:111/tcp \
  -p 0.0.0.0:2049:2049/udp \
  -p 0.0.0.0:2049:2049/tcp \
  -v /usr/local/docker/nbi:/nbi \
  -v /usr/local/docker/exports:/etc/exports \
  --name unfs3 macadmins/unfs3 \

If you’re using Graham’s script, just add these commands to it in the right places. Here’s the complete script I use in my environment (note I’ve left the macadmins/netboot-httpd container there so I can switch between NFS and HTTP):

There are a couple of other differences! Pay attention to line 45 where we tell BSDPy to use NFS as its protocol. Also notice that the line in Graham’s original script containing BSDPY_NBI_URL=http://$IP that would be present if we were using HTTP, has been removed. I also set up TFTP to use a block size of 1468 bytes which helps 2016/2017 Touchbar MacBook Pros in my environment (that’s another story).

Finally, don’t forget to tell your NetBoot images to use NFS instead of HTTP! Look at the NBImageInfo.plist file in your NetBoot image’s .nbi folder and change the **** key from **HTTP** to **NFS**:

<key>Type</key>
<string>NFS</string>

Sources:

https://github.com/macadmins/unfs3