Overview of NFS

Overview of NFS

The Network File System (NFS^®) is a service that enables machines of different architectures running different operating systems to share resources across a network. NFS makes it possible for a machine to share local files and directories and permits remote users to access those files and directories as though they were local to the user's machine.

NFS provides file sharing in a heterogeneous environment, potentially containing many different operating systems; it has been implemented on operating systems including MS-DOS^® and VMS^®.

NFS can be implemented on different operating systems because it defines an abstract model of a filesystem. On each operating system, the NFS model is mapped into the local filesystem semantics. As a result, normal filesystem operations, such as read/write, operate in the same way that they operate on a local filesystem.