Why doesn't my EFS file system automatically mount when rebooting my EC2 instance?

Short description

Amazon EFS auto mounts on reboot using the Amazon EFS mount helper or the Linux NFS client. Auto mounting might fail for the following reasons:

• The Amazon EFS mount helper isn't installed.
• The Linux NFS client isn't installed.
• The _netdev option isn't included in the EFS mount entry in /etc/fstab.

Resolution

Amazon EFS mount helper

The Amazon EFS mount helper is a part of amazon-efs-utils. This package is available for installation on Amazon Linux and Amazon Linux 2 AMIs.

Check if the amazon-efs-utils package is installed on the instance:

$ rpm -qa amazon-efs-utils

If the package isn't installed, then run the following command to install it Amazon Linux and Amazon Linux 2 AMIs:

$ sudo yum install -y amazon-efs-utils

For more information, see Installing the Amazon EFS client on Amazon Linux and Amazon Linux 2.

To install amazon-efs-utils on other Linux distributions, see Installing the Amazon EFS client on other Linux distributions.

Linux NFS client

Verify that the Linux NFS client is installed on the instance.

Note: Use the Linux NFS client only when encryption or access points aren't used.

If the package isn't installed, then run the following commands to install it:

Amazon Linux 1, Amazon Linux 2, RHEL

$ sudo yum -y install nfs-utils

Ubuntu

$ sudo apt-get -y install nfs-common

Run one of the following commands to start the service:

$ sudo service nfs start

-or-

$ sudo service nfs-server start

For more information see, Installing the NFS client.

_netdev option

The automount could fail if _netdev option isn't used in the EFS mount entry in /etc/fstab. The _netdev option prevents the operating system from mounting EFS until the network is enabled as EFS required network access.

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Related information

Recommended NFS mount options