Setting up NFS server on Gentoo

Question

I'm trying to set up an NFS server on a Gentoo VM. I've installed nfs-utils-1.2.2 and added the following line to the /etc/exports file:

/root/svn 10.0.0.0/255.0.0.0(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)

However, when I try to start the nfs service I get the following errors:

gentoo-amd64-francis orig # /etc/init.d/nfs start
FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.24-9-pve/modules.dep: No such file or directory
 * Exporting NFS directories ...                                                          [ ok ]
 * Starting NFS mountd ...                                                                [ !! ]
 * Starting NFS daemon ...                                                                [ !! ]
 * Starting NFS smnotify ...                                                              [ ok ]

It complains about not finding the /lib/modules/2.6.24-9-pve/modules.dep file, but the /lib/modules directory doesn't even exist on this machine.

Does anyone know how to get it to work?

Answer 1

The FATAL error is caused by modprobe being run to insert the nfsd module.

Since there's no modules directory, I'm assuming that you're running a completely module free kernel. If this isn't the case, you'll need to go to your kernel source directory (usually /usr/src/linux) and run "make modules_install" to create this directory.

The service startup script only tries to load the module if it can't find the nfsd filesystem in the list of supported filesystems (cat /proc/filesystems to look at this yourself). Having this situation in a module free kernel implies that nfs has not been compiled into the kernel. nfs-utils is just the userspace side to get nfs working, the actual guts of it needs to be compiled into the kernel. Run make menuconfig in your kernel source directory to check this.

Hope this helps!