NFStash ⏞ : NFS client CLI tools

NFStash (pronounced "en-ef stash") is a suite of command line tools for Linux and other POSIX operating systems which implement Network File System (NFS) client procedures. These utilities can be used for testing, debugging, monitoring and benchmarking the responses from an NFS server in a composable and reproducible way, either interactively or in scripts.

The suite consists of these tools:

| Command | Protocol | RPC | Description | | ------- | -------- | --- | ----------- | | nfsping | NFS, MOUNT, RPCBIND, NLM, KLM, ACL, RQUOTA, NSM | NULL | Checks status and response time of various RPC protocols on NFS servers | | nfsmount | MOUNT | MNT, EXPORT | Finds NFS filesystem root filehandles | | nfsdf | NFS | FSSTAT | Reports NFS server disk space usage | | nfsls | NFS | READDIRPLUS, GETATTR, READLINK | Lists files and directories on an NFS server | | nfscat | NFS | READ | Reads and prints files using NFS | | nfslock | NLM | TEST | Checks if an NFS client can lock a file | | clear_locks | NSM, NLM | NOTIFY, FREE_ALL | Clears stuck file locks on an NFS server | | nfsup | RPCBIND, MOUNT, NFS | NULL, EXPORT | Nagios-compatible plugin for checking NFS server status |

The goal of the project is to eventually support all 22 NFS version 3 client procedures.

Main Features

• Free and Open Source software (BSD licensed)
• Written in C for portability and speed
• Built from the original Sun RPC protocol specification files
• No dependencies on the operating system's NFS client
• Easily readable and parseable JSON output
• Timing output compatible with fping, Graphite or StatsD

Installation

$ git clone git://github.com/mprovost/NFStash.git
$ cd NFStash && make
$ sudo make install

• make install will copy the binaries to /usr/local/bin/ and manpages to /usr/local/share/man/. To change this run prefix=<path> make install.
• Requires gmake.
• Uses some gcc-isms which may mean it won't compile with other C compilers.
• Manpages are built with ronn.
• RPC code is generated with rpcgen (available in the rpcsvc-proto Debian package).
• glibc removed the Sun RPC functions in release 2.26. These functions are now provied by libtirpc library (available in the libtirpc-dev Debian package).
• It doesn't compile on OSX yet due to a missing clock_gettime() - this will take some porting effort (probably using monotonic_clock).
• The Makefile uses a test in the /config directory to check whether it needs to link the realtime library (-lrt) to pull in clock_gettime(). This is included in libc itself in glibc > 2.17.

Roadmap

Development of NFStash is paused, but the current version is stable.

• [ ] convert internal time calculations to nanoseconds
• [ ] HDRHistogram support
• [ ] Workaround Coordinated Omission like wrk2
• [ ] OSX support (clock_gettime)
• [ ] Multithreaded so slow responses don't block other requests?
• [ ] A simplified version of NFSping for Nagios-compatible monitoring checks
• [ ] Simplify output formats and move output conversion to a utility
• [ ] Privilege separation to drop root privileges after binding to reserved ports for "secure" NFS servers

Contributing

Patches and bug reports are welcome. If someone is interested in contributing code to the project, sponsorship for a development environment in Google Cloud Engine or Amazon Web Services is available. Please contact the author for more details.