2003 and NFS

[Sharon Lewis]

Does anyone know of any successful implementations of NFS Group to Group User mapping on an Active Directory Domain. We have been trying unsuccesfully on NAS2000 with WSS2003, we are now hearing that it may not work they way it is documented. We have tried to test the NFS Authentication Server on a PDC and it still does not work

[Sudhakar J_1]

Hi,
To use the active directory groups and users you need to install the NFS Authentication component on all of your dc's.

Since you have more than one NAS device i recommend you to designate one of them (or one of the dc's) as user name mapping server

Then on the designated user name mapping server do all the mappings you need and edit the C:\SFU\Mapper\.maphosts (Help is avilable in the same file)

Now point all the NAS/WSS devices to use the designated User Name Mapping server.You can do it to NFS COnsole.

[Sharon Lewis]

Thank you for your response. Besides production we have a development and a DR enviroment. We won't want all enviroments especially DR to point to same User Mapping server. If a site were to be unavailable, we need to be able to point to a different user mapping server in our DR enviroment which is located on the same domain.
Can you have multiple user mapping servers in one domain?

[Sudhakar J_1]

Yes you can have multiple User Name Mapping server and use DNS round robin method for load balancing.

Also User Name Mapping is Cluster aware so if you have a cluster server you can achive a good high availability with UNM on Cluster.

[Sharon Lewis]

If we have multiple user mappings.
How do we set from the Domain Controller access to multiple user mapping servers. Can you put multiple server names in NFS Server For Authentication with a comma or semi-colon. How would we direct the NFS autheniticatation to development NAS Box for testing new projects. We are not trying to load balance we have different server for development and DR but they share the same domain.

[Sudhakar J_1]

You can have as many User Name Mapping servers as you want, there is no limit for no of UNM's in a single domain.

[Karthik S S]

Thank you Sudhakar for giving a helping hand to Sharon on my request. These days I have noticed many of the SFU related threads in the forums. One such is,
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=520349

Hope you will enjoy ..!!

-Karthik S S

(No points for this please ...)

[Sharon Lewis]

Karthik,
I noticed sevral people with the same issues. The manual you posted was SFU 3.5. We are having problems with group to group mapping,the NFS authentication server is on the domain but it did not change the fact that group mapping will not work. We get RPC errors when trying to view files in Exported directories.Do you know of any succesfful implementations of Group to Group mapping using SFU 3.0?

[Sudhakar J_1]

Hi,
If i understand correctly, the way you mean group to group mapping is you have windows group and a unix group and you want to map these and users in that group need to have permissions for the folder based on the group mapping. If this is what you want then it will work.i have seen this.

If you donot map user but only map groups then new files will have owner nobody when u ls -l but the group will be proper with correct permissions.

[Stefano Costantini_2]

Hi, i have the same problem with a difference: i have bought a nas2000 and i don't find the product key to install the microsoft services for nfs on my domain controller.

What to do?

Stefano

[Vincent Fleming]

Stephano,

If you need to install NFS services on your DC, then you'll have to buy a license for Windows - the licesing that comes with the NAS2000 is for the NAS2000, not your DC.

Cheers,

Vince

[Monty Phillips]

We have seen a few cases where you are prompted for a license key when installing the NFS authentication software on your DC.

The SFU 3.0 retail CD is provided with the NAS products to be used for NFS domain authentication only, and cannot be installed
on the NAS server. There is also a new retail version of SFU available online that can also be used for NFS Authentication.

This version is SFU 3.5 and it cannot be installed on the NAS either. SFU 3.5 is a free download. The same NFS Authentication
install instructions for the NAS are used on SFU 3.5 as SFU 3.0.

These instructions are found in the NAS Administration Guide in the Microsoft Services for NFS chapter. SFU 3.5 can be
downloaded from:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/downloads/default.asp

- Monty