I'm moving another laptop to Debian with KDE. At home, I have a Synology NAS with two directories that I'd like to access through NFS, similar to the NFS mounts already working on my Linux desktop. The laptop will often be used away from home and won't be connected to my network during boot.
If the NFS entries are listed in /etc/fstab, will the laptop still boot when the NAS is unreachable, or will it wait indefinitely for the mounts? I'd like the system to continue booting normally and simply leave the directories unavailable until I connect to my home network through a WireGuard VPN. I'm fine with mounting them manually after the VPN is active, although automatic mounting would also be useful.
I'd prefer to continue using NFS rather than install or configure SMB/Samba. Since the NFS traffic would travel through the encrypted VPN tunnel, I'm wondering whether that is a reasonable setup.
2 Answers
NFS is fine for this arrangement as long as the NAS is reachable only through the WireGuard tunnel. NFS itself generally does not encrypt traffic, so don’t expose its ports directly to the internet. With the VPN carrying the traffic, the tunnel provides the encryption and the NAS can remain inaccessible from outside your home network.
Once the VPN is connected, you can run the mount command with elevated privileges, or configure a systemd automount/service if you later decide you want it to happen automatically.
Add the `nofail` option to each NFS entry in `/etc/fstab`. That tells the system to continue booting even if the NAS cannot be reached. Without it, systemd may wait for the mount attempt to time out, and depending on the configuration that can make booting very slow or appear stuck.
You can also consider `x-systemd.automount`, which creates an automount point and only attempts to contact the NAS when the directory is accessed. For a laptop, this is often more convenient than mounting everything during startup. After bringing up the VPN, you can also mount the shares manually if you prefer.
`nofail` is useful even at home because a powered-off or unavailable NAS shouldn’t prevent the computer from starting. A systemd unit or network-manager hook could also bring up the VPN and mount the shares automatically, but manual mounting is perfectly reasonable.
You don’t need SMB just because the laptop is away from home. Keeping NFS behind the VPN is a reasonable choice, provided the firewall does not expose the NFS services publicly.