nfs permissions

[Stephanie L Davenport]

I have two 10.01 servers that are basically identical (one is an ignite image of the other). They both have an NFS directory mounted from an 11.0 system. HostA is the original, HostB is the ignite copy.

HostA's nfs mount hangs any time you try to copy anything to it. But, you can create a file from within the mount and see it on the other servers.

HostB's nfs mount works just fine. Files can be copied with no problem.

The only difference between the two machines is that everything has been removed out of HostB's /etc/hosts file except itself. When I do the mount, I use the IP address of the 11.0 server.

So, I tried mounting the directory on hostA with the IP of the 11.0 server and it still doesn't work.

I've tried the "/test" thing that didn't work, either. Seems to be a permissions problem.

When I go to hostA, cd into the mounted directory, and try to copy something into it from a local directory it says:

hostA:/test# cp /home/steph/adviser.out .
cp: cannot create ./adviser.out: Permission denied

I've been working on this for 12 hours and it's about to drive me nuts.

Please help!

[Ruben Maarsen · Accepted solution]

Hi Stephanie,

Are both clients mounted at the same time?
Did you check the /etc/hosts file on the 11 server?
So if you do a hostA:/test#touch test.txt it works?

Rgds Ruben.

[Matti_Kurkela]

Are you testing as root? Remember that unless specifically configured otherwise, the NFS client's root is considered "nobody" in the NFS server's point of view - so the client's root can write only to world-writable NFS-mounted directories. This is enforced by the 11.0 server, so nothing you do on HostA or HostB will change it.

How does the 11.0 server's /etc/exports look? Are there any references to HostA or HostB by name?

Get the IP addresses of HostA and HostB and do a nslookup for those IP addresses _on the 11.0 server_. After that, you'll know what kind of names the 11.0 server sees when it converts the IP address of the NFS request into a name.

The names may come from /etc/hosts of the 11.0 server or from the DNS, but the bottom line is that they must match _exactly_ to the names used in /etc/exports if any names are used in there. "name" is not necessarily the same thing as "name.domain".

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

I'd check the log files on this, /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log


I'd also point out that these systems are way, way out of support and might benefit from an OS upgrade.

Compare the /etc/exports files and see whats happening there.

swverify \* maybe there is software corruptions.

SEP