Configure NFS Services to Use Fixed Ports (NFSv3 and NFSv2)

Description

Firewalling should be done at each host and at the border firewalls to protect the NFS daemons from remote access, since NFS servers should never be accessible from outside the organization. However, by default for NFSv3 and NFSv2, the RPC Bind service assigns each NFS service to a port dynamically at service startup time. Dynamic ports cannot be protected by port filtering firewalls such as iptables.

Therefore, restrict each service to always use a given port, so that firewalling can be done effectively. Note that, because of the way RPC is implemented, it is not possible to disable the RPC Bind service even if ports are assigned statically to all RPC services.

In NFSv4, the mounting and locking protocols have been incorporated into the protocol, and the server listens on the the well-known TCP port 2049. As such, NFSv4 does not need to interact with the rpcbind, lockd, and rpc.statd daemons, which can and should be disabled in a pure NFSv4 environment. The rpc.mountd daemon is still required on the NFS server to setup exports, but is not involved in any over-the-wire operations.