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

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 files
• No requirement for any libraries other than libc (and librt for clock_gettime() if using an older version of GNU libc).
• 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 edit the prefix in the Makefile.
• 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.
• At the moment it doesn't compile on FreeBSD because of conflicts with the portmap header files that it generates and the builtin RPC headers shipped with FreeBSD.
• 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

NFStash is under active development and heading towards an initial stable release.

• convert internal time calculations to nanoseconds
• HDRHistogram support
• Workaround Coordinated Omission like wrk2
• Fix portmap header conflicts on *BSD
• 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.