The three methods of mounting network filesystems (immediate mount -command line-; always mounted; and mounted on-demand) use a common configuration file /etc/fstab. Over the years, additional features and services have updated the options in /etc/fstab. Functionality that required external packages, services and configuration are now combined under systemd services.
Network File System is a filesystem protocol built upon the Open Network Computing Remote Procedure Call system (ONC RPC). RPCs are managed by the portmap service.
- Andrew File System (AFS) is a distributed, network filesystem built for high performance. OpenAFS is an open source branch of the original AFS now owned by IBM.
The Server Message Block (SMB) protocol was originally designed at IBM and later incorporated as the de facto networking file/print sharing system for Microsoft Windows.
The most common errors found in setting up network filesystems are: