External File Systems
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Video Transcription
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>> Hello Cybrarians, and welcome back to
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the Linux Plus course here at Cybrary.
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I'm your instructor, Rob Goelz.
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In today's lesson, we're going to be
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discussing external file systems.
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Upon completion of today's lesson,
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you are going to be able to describe
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external filesystems that are used in Linux,
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>> and then differentiate between NFS, SMB, and NTFS,
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>> as well as explain multipathing in Linux.
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>> The network file system or NFS
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is just a standard that we use to access
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data on storage that's across a network,
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network file system, storage across a network.
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Now an nfs share is mounted or exported to make
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that share available, and we can use
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the showmount command to display nfs mounts,
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so use showmount -e, and then we provide
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the nfs_system_name where we're
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trying to see those nfs mounts.
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Now, to access an NFS directory,
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we have to be mounting it.
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We use the mount command.
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For example, we might have
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an NFS server named nfserver,
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>> because I'm not creative,
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>> with an export called /files
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>> and a mount point of /mnt/files,
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>> so we can do mount -t for type,
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and we're going to specify NFS is our type.
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The name of the NFS server is nfserver:/files,
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that's the export, and
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then we're going to mount it locally
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on our machine at the /mnt/files location.
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Now, Windows filesystems use something
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called Server Message Block or SMB
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for that type of network storage,
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>> and sometimes this is referred to
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>> also as Common Internet File System or CIFS.
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>> CIFS and SMB are often used interchangeably.
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Linux has a client for SMB that's called Samba.
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SMB Samba, get it?
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We can use the command smbclient to
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view and access any shared SMB filesystems.
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We just do smbclient -L,
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then we provide the server name,
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the Samba server -U,
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and provide the username to access that server because
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with Windows we have to provide
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our Windows authentication as well.
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Now, SMB shares can be mounted using mount as well,
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so for example, if we had
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an SMB server that was named win1,
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with a files export and
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a mount point on our system of mount files,
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we can mount that using mount//,
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two forward slashes because we're using SMB here.
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So mount//win1/files,
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so win1 is a server and files is the export,
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and mount files is the next thing we put
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in, /mnt/files, to indicate
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that we want to mount that export,
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that Samba export at mount files on our system.
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Now, NTFS is either the
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>> NT File System or the New Technology File System
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>> depending upon who you ask and it
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>> is the default file system for Microsoft Windows.
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You can theoretically use NTFS in Linux,
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although I've never seen that done.
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But there is some information out there on this.
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>> See ntfs -3g is an open source implementation
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>> and you can go and look that up.
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I believe that this is only mentioned
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>> in the exam blueprint to drill this into your head.
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>> NTFS can be used in Linux, but I don't know why.
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>> You might lose access to
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remote storage devices if a network path is lost,
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>> and multipathing allows you
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>> to create a bunch of paths to
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>> a remote storage device,
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>> and then you can use those paths.
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>> You can aggregate them to increase your throughput,
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or you can use them so that you have fault tolerance.
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>> If you lose a path,
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>> you don't lose access to that remote file system,
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you just lose that one path,
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and we can use the kpartx command to
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create multipath storage device entries.
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Now, the command multipath
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is used when we want to view or
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detect these multipath devices,
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and multipathing in Linux
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is accomplished through that thing
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we've already mentioned, the Device Mapper,
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so you use device mapper for multipathing as well.
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The dm-multipath kernel module
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provides the multipath support.
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Linux actually creates an mpath file
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inside of /dev/mapper,
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which we talked about previously,
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>> and that's created for
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>> each new multipath storage device added,
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>> and that works just like any other device file.
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>> In this lesson, we covered
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the different external filesystems
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>> that are used in Linux,
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>> as well as the differences between NFS, SMB,
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and NTFS, and then finally,
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we touched upon the multipathing in Linux.
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Thanks so much for being here,
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>> and I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson.
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