Basically on SuSe (which I never touched until our chat) you have to make sure the NFS server services are running on the NFS server. These services are started from /etc/init.d/nfsserver. If it's not running you can type "/etc/init.d/nfsserver start". You'll want to make sure this automatically starts when you boot your NFS server machine. In SuSe this probably can be done in Yast, or by creating the appropriate symbolic links in /etc/rc*.d. You create your NFS share in /etc/exports, you share it by typing "exportfs -a". Then on the server you can type "showmount -e localhost" to see if the server indeed has it shared properly. On the client you would type "showmount -e <servername_or_IP>". If that works, you *should* be able to mount the share on the client by typing "mount servername_or_IP:/sharename /localmountpoint".
I think that is a recap of what we did, other than determining why you were originally getting "permission denied" messages. We figured that out by "ssh'ing" to your server from your client and typing "who -l" to determin the address or name that your server sees you coming from and making sure that address or name matches what you have in /etc/exports. After making a change you can do another "exportfs -a" to make the change effective and then retry the mount command.
You can put it into your own words. Again, this is just scratching the surface but it shows the basics of how to create an NFS share and mount it. You really should set up DNS so you can use names instead of IP addresses (or at least enter records in your /etc/hosts files for all of your machines). Like I mentioned earlier, NIS and NFS are a good combo, you might look at attempting to set up NIS next. This can be a little more difficult than NFS but once you get them all set up it's a piece of cake. NIS comes in really handy when you have a lot of machines and a lot of user logins and the users need to be able to log in to any of the machines using the same password. And it makes sure their userIDs are equivelant (same number which is critical in NFS). In addition, when they log in their "home" directories can be automatically mounted on the client from the server when the user logs in. But now that you hopefully have the very basic understanding of how to do it, search around google for some other docs to gain more ideas..
Normally you do not want to have NFS/portmap/mountd etc running on a machine that is directly attached to the public Internet as it is not the most secure protocol, depending on which version of NFS you are running. The older version is not encrypted and portmap is one of the most exploited *NIX services. It's fine for internal network use though.
Also we didn't get into detail on your multiple NIC configuration on your machines. I'm not sure what you have intended with them but I can see where you can run in to problems the way you currently have it set up. Normally a machine that has multiple NICs is connected to multiple networks (on different subnets). You had your NICs assigned addresses on the same subnet. But again, I do not know what you intend on setting up so you may have a valid reason for this.
[ March 27, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]