Provlems with vagrant nfs shares on Debian

If you are having problems with running Vagrant box with NFS shares, here are possible solutions.

To install nfs you should need only to: apt-get install portmap nfs-kernel-server.

If vagrant whines with:

It appears your machine doesn't support NFS, or there is not an
adapter to enable NFS on this machine for Vagrant. Please verify
that ``nfsd`` is installed on your machine, and try again. If you're
on Windows, NFS isn't supported. If the problem persists, please
contact Vagrant support.

Possible solutions:

  • Check if there is nfsd entry in /proc/filesystems if there is no such entry, or there is only nfs or nfs4 entry something is wrong with your host.

  • Maybe nfs kernel module is not loaded? Try modprobe nfs; modprobe nfsd and see if it helps,

  • Maybe you forgot to install rules for nfs to your firewall?

    Check if you can telnet to:

    • Port 111 on your machine from your machine
    • Port 2049 on your machine from your machine
    • Port 111 on your machine from your vagrant box
    • Port 2049 on your machine from your vagrant box

  • If you disabled ufw it might still screw your network communication, so:

    ufw enable
ufw default allow
ufw disable

    In my case after this and after restarting nfs-kernel-server everything worked like a charm.

  • On debian I had a weird error in which nfs didn't start, because there were no exports defined, which in turn caused Vagrant to bail out with "It appears your machine doesn't support NFS... ". This can be diagnosed if:

    root@karmapachyenno:~# systemctl status nfs-kernel-server.service
● nfs-kernel-server.service - LSB: Kernel NFS server support
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server; bad; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (exited) since Tue 2015-12-29 17:13:42 CET; 33min ago
     Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
  Process: 949 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

Dec 29 17:13:42 karmapachyenno systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Kernel NFS server support...
Dec 29 17:13:42 karmapachyenno nfs-kernel-server[949]: Not starting NFS kernel daemon: no exports. ... (warning).
Dec 29 17:13:42 karmapachyenno systemd[1]: Started LSB: Kernel NFS server support.

    This:

    • Can be fixed by adding any exports to /etc/exports.
    • I fixed it by modprobe nfs; modprobe nfsd, then running vagrant, which will add /etc/exports, then reloading kernel-server and restarting vagrant.

  • After everything works --- take some time to re-enable your firewalls ;)