How to get NFS Server on Windows 10?

Question

Although NFS Client/Server exist on Windows Server versions. I'm using Windows 10 Pro, and there's just the NFS Client available.

How can I get this NFS Server (provided by Microsoft) in Windows 10 Pro ?

Your comments are welcome.

Solution 1

The easiest way is to use a piece of third party software, as (as far as I know), Windows 10 does not have built in NFS server capabilities. A good, simple and easy to deploy solution is Free NFS (http://freenfs.sourceforge.net/) written by Larry. E. Smith. There are a couple of other options as well.

Solution 2

Confirmed, it is not built in to Windows nor supported by Microsoft. At this point you can use Windows Subsystem for Linux version 2 (WSL2) to run an NFS server from your Linux side. For that, you would follow the Ubuntu instructions for setting up an NFS server.

Run your BASH terminal WSL2

At a terminal prompt enter the following command to install the NFS Server:

sudo apt install nfs-kernel-server

To start the NFS server, you can run the following command at a terminal prompt:

sudo systemctl start nfs-kernel-server.service

Configuration

You can configure the directories to be exported by adding them to the /etc/exports file. For example:

/srv     *(ro,sync,subtree_check)
/home    *.hostname.com(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)
/scratch *(rw,async,no_subtree_check,no_root_squash,noexec)

Make sure any custom mount points you’re adding have been created (/srv and /home will already exist):

sudo mkdir /scratch

Apply the new config via:

sudo exportfs -a

Another option is Allegro NFS Server for Windows

Comments

[Ravindra Bawane]

What have you tried? If Microsoft offered this function in the desktop OS, it seems a simple search would quickly show the way. So, what research have you done and what have you tried?

[Ravindra Bawane]

Further, is there a reason why SMB/CIFS won't work?