Mounting File Systems Without the EFS Mount Helper
Note
In the following section, you can learn how to install the Network File System (NFS)
client and how to mount your Amazon EFS file system on an Amazon EC2 instance. You
also can find an
explanation of the mount
command and the available options for specifying your
file system's Domain Name System (DNS) name in the mount
command. In addition,
you can find how to use the file fstab
to automatically remount your file
system after any system restarts.
Note
Before you can mount a file system, you must create, configure, and launch your related AWS resources. For detailed instructions, see Getting Started with Amazon Elastic File System.
Topics
NFS Support
Amazon EFS supports the Network File System versions 4.0 and 4.1 (NFSv4) and NFSv4.0 protocols when mounting your file systems on Amazon EC2 instances. Although NFSv4.0 is supported, we recommend that you use NFSv4.1. Mounting your Amazon EFS file system on your Amazon EC2 instance also requires an NFS client that supports your chosen NFSv4 protocol.
To get the best performance out of your file system, use an Amazon EC2 Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that includes a Linux kernel that is version 4.0 or newer. We recommend using Amazon Linux AMI 2016.03.0 or Amazon Linux AMI 2016.09.0 as the AMI for the Amazon EC2 instance to mount your file system to.
Note
Using Amazon EFS with Microsoft Windows Amazon EC2 instances is not supported.
Troubleshooting AMI and Kernel Versions
To troubleshoot issues related to certain AMI or kernel versions when using Amazon EFS from an EC2 instance, see Troubleshooting AMI and Kernel Issues.
Installing the NFS Client
To mount your Amazon EFS file system on your Amazon EC2 instance, first you need to
install an NFS
client. To connect to your EC2 instance and install an NFS client, you need the public
DNS
name of the EC2 instance and a user name to log in. That user name for your instance
is
typically ec2-user
.
To connect your EC2 instance and install the NFS client
-
Connect to your EC2 instance. Note the following about connecting to the instance:
-
To connect to your instance from a computer running Mac OS or Linux, specify the .pem file to your Secure Shell (SSH) client with the
-i
option and the path to your private key. -
To connect to your instance from a computer running Windows, you can use either MindTerm or PuTTY. If you plan to use PuTTY, you need to install it and use the following procedure to convert the .pem file to a .ppk file.
For more information, see the following topics in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances:
-
Connecting to Your Linux Instance Using SSH
The key file cannot be publicly viewable for SSH. You can use the
chmod 400
filename
.pem
command to set these permissions. For more information, see Create a Key Pair.
-
-
(Optional) Get updates and reboot.
$ sudo yum -y update $ sudo reboot
-
After the reboot, reconnect to your EC2 instance.
-
Install the NFS client.
If you're using an Amazon Linux AMI or Red Hat Linux AMI, install the NFS client with the following command.
$ sudo yum -y install nfs-utils
If you're using an Ubuntu Amazon EC2 AMI, install the NFS client with the following command.
$ sudo apt-get -y install nfs-common
If you use a custom kernel (that is, if you build a custom AMI), you need to include at a minimum the NFSv4.1 client kernel module and the right NFS4 userspace mount helper.
Note
If you choose Amazon Linux AMI 2016.03.0 or
Amazon Linux AMI 2016.09.0 when launching your Amazon EC2
instance, you don't need to install nfs-utils
because it's already included
in the AMI by default.
Next: Mount Your File System
Use one of the following procedures to mount your file system.