wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on network drive

Written by Peter Davies on .

Just setting up a backup drive for a VPS and needed to remember about the default missing NFS software which means that you get an error running a mount on system:

root@server:~# echo "7126679-hostbackup.com:/backups/11.22.33.44 /backups nfs rw,hard,intr,noexec,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,nfsvers=4,noatime,_netdev,nolock 0 0" >> /etc/fstab; mount -a

Resulting in:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on 7126679-hostbackup.com:/backups/11.22.33.44,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       (for several filesystems (e.g. nfs, cifs) you might
       need a /sbin/mount. helper program)
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so

With a simple install of the nfs-common package we can get this up and running without issue:

apt-get install nfs-common

Running mount -a then correctly mounts the network volume, in this case used for backups.