[comp.unix.ultrix] Yellow Pages under Ultrix 4.1

jeff@satchmo (Jeff Detterman) (01/31/91)

I recently upgraded my Ultrix workstations from Ultrix 2.0
to 4.1. I am running a mixed environment of Suns (sparc1s) 
and decstation 3100/5000 since the upgrade I have seen the 
following problems on the Suns: mount:hostname:/dir 
server not responding:RPC:authentication error: why=Invalid
client credentials. I am running the Yellow page master on 
the DEC. My /etc/exports files export the above directories
to everyone. The DECs are able to mount the SUNS and the suns
are able to ping/rlogin etc the DECS. The interesting twist 
is that if you reboot the Suns all of the directories in 
question mount fine. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Please send responses to j_detter@hwking.catd.cr.rok.com

Jeff Detterman 
Rockwell Intl

iglesias@draco.acs.uci.edu (Mike Iglesias) (01/31/91)

In article <1991Jan31.003236.25647@zoot.avgrp.cr.rok.com> jeff@satchmo (Jeff Detterman) writes:
>I recently upgraded my Ultrix workstations from Ultrix 2.0
>to 4.1. I am running a mixed environment of Suns (sparc1s) 
>and decstation 3100/5000 since the upgrade I have seen the 
>following problems on the Suns: mount:hostname:/dir 
>server not responding:RPC:authentication error: why=Invalid
>client credentials. I am running the Yellow page master on 
>the DEC. My /etc/exports files export the above directories
>to everyone. The DECs are able to mount the SUNS and the suns
>are able to ping/rlogin etc the DECS. The interesting twist 
>is that if you reboot the Suns all of the directories in 
>question mount fine. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I've seen this, and it happens because root on the Suns is in more
than 8 groups.  When the Suns send the RPC packet to mountd on the 
DECstations, it puts all the groups in there.  DEC's mountd can
only handle up to 8, and if it sees more than that in there, it
rejects the mount with "invalid client credentials".  I don't know
who is at fault here, Sun for passing more than 8 groups or DEC
for not allowing more than 8 groups (maybe one of the NFS wizards
out there would know).  It sure would be nice to know which one is
at fault so I (and others out there) can bang on them to fix it.

I suspect that during startup, the Suns haven't got enough information
from YP yet to pass all the groups in the RPC packet so the mount
succeeds.  NeXT systems do the same things as Suns, so if you have
some of those around, you'll have this problem with them too (don't
try to use the NeXT automounter with YP automount maps - it's
completely FUBAR).

If you can reduce the number of groups root is in, it should work.  You
could also create another uid 0 id that isn't in all the groups that
root is in and do the mounts after su'ing to that user.  I took
root out of groups that it didn't need to be in.


Mike Iglesias
University of California, Irvine
Internet:    iglesias@draco.acs.uci.edu
BITNET:      iglesias@uci
uucp:        ...!ucbvax!ucivax!iglesias