Local access to an NFS share is useful enough that I want it enabled by default, without the need for the mount command as shown in my previous post.

This default access to the server share also goes by the name "auto-mount". You have two options for setting it up: using the autofs utility or a static mount point. I'm not sure what their relative merits are. I chose the latter.

First I created a local home for the NFS share:

sudo mkdir /from_server

Then I made a simple edit to the /etc/fstab file:

my_server_url:/usr/home/gabi /home/gabi/from_server nfs rw,hard,intr 0 0

That's all. From now on, the contents of my home folder on the FreeBSD server will show up in the /from_server directory on the Ubuntu client, with read-write access.