Playing nice with Linux NFS

I naively assumed that mounting an NFS volume exported by Linux would be uneventful, and it should be. My initial attempt to manually perform an NFS mount failed without any client side error message.

Checking system logs on the Mac revealed nothing.

The Linux NFS server (Red Hat Enterprise 5) complained with this warning:

nfsd: request from insecure port (192.168.7.130:49232)!

After some Internet sleuthing, I found Mac client side NFS tries to mount NFS volumes over high TCP ports (>1024). You must explicitly tell the Linux NFS server to accept mount requests on high ports by adding the "insecure" option to /etc/exports. For example,

/nfstest 192.168.206.0/24(rw,async,insecure)

Then, NFS mounts from OS X should work as expected.