TCP/IP Guide

NFS Server Procedures and Operations

The actual exchange of information between an NFS client and server is performed by the underlying RPC protocol. NFS functionality is therefore described not in terms of specific protocol operations, but by delineating the different actions that a client may take on files residing on a server. In the original version of NFS, NFSv2, these are called NFS server procedures.

Each procedure represents a particular action that a client may perform, such as reading from a file, writing to a file, or creating or removing a directory. The operations performed on the file require that the file be referenced using a data structure called a file handle. As the name suggests, the file handle, like the handle of a real object, ...