export filesystem root= to more than 256 hostnames?

[Jackie Andrason_1]

I have an NFS server that I have to export a certain filesystem to 792 servers, with the root= option. I can't use netgroups, and there is a 256 hostname limitation for /etc/exports. There's gotta be a way around this.

Thanks a bunch!

[Sajid_1]

hello,

You are right! The maximum limit for root option is 256. You cannot go beyond this point, so in your case it will be impossible. Check the netgroups option

hth

[Jackie Andrason_1]

According to the man page, you cannot use netgroups with -root= , it has to be hostnames.

[Shannon Petry]

No NFS server (exportfs package) I have ever worked with supports more than 256 hostnames, and unless you plan to compile your own NFS system, you can not make it do so.
netgroups will alleviate some of these problems, but is NOT available with the root option.
Solaris supports a network and domain option for nfs exports, but neither of these support root access either.

Work around:
create a new user, which is not root but owns the file systems you need to give root access too. This will let you have create/modify access on the base of the export and perhaps alleviate some problems.

Problems: you can not rm -r an exported dir that isnt your own. (not a bad thing IMHO).
chown/chgrp/chmod -R's must be issued by owner. (again good IMHO).

So in essense, if you present the reason why you need the 800 clients root access, I and many others here can offer work-throughs. As the world is today though, it aint happening.
(I think windows supports huge acl's like this, but then again it takes 1/2 an hour to copy a 40M file in a 20 seat lan at 100baseT)

Regards,
Shannon

[Martin Johnson]

Dumb question: Would using pseudo root account bypass the 256 limit? (Pseudo root: userid, password, UID=0)

I always have a pseudo root account on my systems in case something happens to the root account. It also provides better auditing when more than one person needs to have root access.

HTH
Marty

[harry d brown jr]

Why would one want that many hosts to have root access? Is this the ignite server?

live free or die
harry

[Jackie Andrason_1]

This is for a monitoring tool that currently writes the reports via a temporary NFS mount (after the perl script runs it mounts the filesystem and writes the reports and then unmounts it) to the central server. Until we can get ssh installed on all the systems, we have no other choice. Since it is a security monitoring tool, and because of standards, we can't use .rhosts or rcp either.

[harry d brown jr]

Did anyone catch this?

Jackie, for 11 systems ssh has been ported as a depot:

http://www.software.hp.com/cgi-bin/swdepot_parser.cgi/cgi/displayProductInfo.pl?productNumber=T1471AA

Sorry about not getting back to you earlier! I'd mail the reports before I would open up NFS.

live free or die
harry