The NFS service lets computers of different architecture, running different operating system, share file systems across a network. The NFS service makes the physical location of the file system irrelavant to the user. You can use NFS to allow user to see all the data, regardless of location.With NFS, instead of placing copies of commonly used files on every system, you can place one copy on one computer’s disk and have all other systems across the network access it. Under NFS operation, remote file systems are almost indistinguishable from local ones.

NFS Daemons : NFS uses a number of daemons to handle its services. The most important daemons are listed below:
1) mountd : It does access control. It handles file system mount requests from client.
2) nfsd: It handles client file system requests.
3) statd: It works with ‘lockd’ daemon to provide crash recovery function.
4) lockd: It supports record locking operation on nfs file.
5) nfslogd: It provides operational logging.

With NFS, systems have a client/server relationship. The NFS server is where the file systems resides. The NFS client is a system that mounts a remote file system from a NFS server.