This is a brief guide on some best practices to set up NFS on Unraid.  There are some special considerations on Unraid because of the mover operation.  If NFS is not configured correctly, you can end up with stale file handles.  This isn't a bug in Unraid, it's the way Unraid operates.

 

When you need to connect to a remote share, the best way is to use the Unassigned Devices (UD) plugin to mount and manage the remote shares.  UD is optimized to deal with NFS mounts in a robust fashion.  It is not recommended to mount remote shares with fstab entries on Unraid.

 

The following are some recommendations when setting up NFS:

• Set up your Unraid shares for Private access and limit access by entering rules.
• In Unraid, set the rules to: *(async,no_subtree_check,rw,sec=sys,insecure,anongid=100,anonuid=99,no_root_squash) you may want to adjust a little for your situation - like a specific IP address/range, or root_squash.
• On the client side use these mount parameters: hard,timeo=50,retrans=5,relatime,rsize=1048576,wsize=1048576.

 

When accessing Unraid shares with NFS on 7.0.0, there are some adjustments you can make on Unraid to overcome some NFS issues:

• Unraid uses shfs that is the file aggregation driver on Array disks.  There is an open file limit that might need adjustment if you have a large amount of NFS activity.  This can be adjusted in Settings->Global Share Settings.  Increase the "Number of fuse File Descriptors" if you have trouble with NFS starting and/or shfs crashes and shares are no longer available.
• The other setting is the number of threads available to NFS.  If you have a lot of NFS file activity, increasing the number of threads for NFS can help with NFS operation.  Go to Settings->NFS and increase the number of threads from the default of 8.

 

It is rcommended that you use the Unassigned Devices Plugin (UD) to manage remote NFS shares.  If you use fstab, you have to be sure to set up the mount parameters correctly to maintain a robust connection.  UD is optimized to manage the remote connection for robustness, and when the Unraid array is started and stopped.

Reserved.

On 1/22/2025 at 5:17 PM, dlandon said:

It is rcommended that you use the Unassigned Devices Plugin (UD) to manage remote NFS shares.  If you use fstab, you have to be sure to set up the mount parameters correctly to maintain a robust connection.  UD is optimized to manage the remote connection for robustness, and when the Unraid array is started and stopped.

I used to create scripts back in the early 6.x days such as

		mkdir /mnt/tower3disk1
		mount -t nfs tower3:/mnt/disk1/ /mnt/tower3disk1
		rsync -av --stats --progress /mnt/disk1/ /mnt/tower3disk1/ 

Today the mount part of the script fails either with server name or with IP address.  I used your UD to NFS mount the share on the other server and was able to rsyc as per the example above.  Is there a way to access the UD mounting via script so that unattended backups can still be done?

Edited May 6, 20251 yr by tr0910
clarity

Is there a supported or recommended way to export NFS shares directly from ZFS datasets? E.g. replace FUSE layer with bind-mounts directly to the actual zfs dataset?

NFS exports through FUSE seems to limits NFS to NFSv3 and create issues when mounting those exports from Proxmox and run VM disks over NFS.

Just wanted to clarify, this is for mounting remote shares to Unraid, correct?

Is it okay to use fstab to mount an Unraid share to a remote server? Is there a guide or recommended tutorial on how to do so?