chown doesn't work on an NFS mounted filesystem

[alec pringle]

I am using automount to mount up users home directories from a Solaris NFS server to HP clients. On the HP clients, users are unable to issue the chown command from their own files in their mounted home directories, but are able to change ownership of locally stored files (for example in /tmp). The filesystem is exported from Solaris with the following options:

share -F nfs -o rw,nosuid -d "home dirs" /export/home

...I realise that Solaris (by default) doesn't allow users (other than root) to issue the chown command - could this be why it doesn't work even when mounted in an HP environment, or am I missing something else?

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Alec,

Look at Frank Li's reply in this thread from itrc forum.

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=102446

Hope this helps.

Regds

[alec pringle]

Thanks Sanjay,

I did read this thread but I don't think it is quite the same situation. I have this problem on an HP system, I can issue:

chown oracle /tmp/file.dat
...but not
chown oracle /home/username/file.dat

(where I am the owner of file.dat, and /home/username is automounted from a Solaris NFS server). In fact, after re-reading the thread you suggested I think I should be able to issue both commands successfully on the HP client.

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Alec,

I attached that link since it was mentioning a situation like yours without the nfs coming into the picture. I guess you will have to first allow users on the sun server to do the chown. If that works, it would probably work for sun exported nfs mounts too.

You can also try exporting the sun FS / directory with root access to this hp server and check and see if the root id on hp server is able to change the ownership of the files.

Hope this helps.

Regds