flint@cutmcvax.cs.curtin.edu.au (Daniel Baldoni) (03/01/91)
Recently, I asked about a problem I was having getting NFS talking between
a VAX Ultrix and a couple of IPC's running SunOS 4.1.1. I'm VERY happy to
say that the problem has now been rectified thanks to information passed on
to me by a couple of net-readers (to whom I am eternally grateful <smile>).
Basically, Ultrix seems to have an "access group limit" of 8 (SUN-OS is
reputed to have one of 16). "What the !#%$ is this?" you ask. Well, if a
user who tries to access the Ultrix-exported file system belongs to more than
8 groups, you get an RPC Authentication error. And, guess what? root just
happens to be in all 16 groups on our SUN's.
So the simple solution is to remove root from all entries in /etc/group. Now,
this may get a little confusing as root is implicitly in every group anyhow,
right? Well, I guess that explicit group lists are retained if a username
is actually mentioned in the /etc/group file. I'm not too keen on the
implementation if this is the case.
I'd like to thank both Mike Iglesias (iglesias@draco.acs.uci.edu) and Ric
Anderson (ric@cs.arizona.edu) for this invaluable piece of information.
I'd also like to thank Brian Kelley (brian@cimage.com) for pointing out that
it is essential to have your hostnames in /etc/exports agreeing with the
remote hosts which are doing the mounting. This wasn't a problem in my case
but I can imagine some poor administrator at a large site suffering from this.
--
Daniel Baldoni
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