Introduction

Update: I’m doing the automated mount now with autofs.

I’ve tried to setup NFS on my old Raspberry Pi 1 with Raspbian Stretch. I assumed that I just need to add an entry to the /etc/fstab file and the NFS volume on my Synology NAS would be mounted automatically.

The Problem

So I’ve added this

mynas:/volume1/databases /mnt/databases nfs defaults 0 0

and thought I would be done. I’ve created the /mnt/databases folder with

mkdir /mnt/databases

and tried to mount everything with

mount -a

The Solution

and my volume showed up as mounted. After reboot the volume wasn’t mounted anymore and the service couldn’t find its data. So what shall we do? After some research I’ve found these options, which fixed the problem:

mynas:/volume1/databases /mnt/databases nfs defaults,noauto,x-systemd.automount 0 0

The NFS volume now shows up even after a reboot. I’ve also tried to change the configuration of Raspbian so that it waits for the network before any services start but that didn’t fix the problem. Interestingly the entry with only defaults seems to be working on a Raspberry Pi 3 B.