read/write problem with NFS mounted directories

[Mark Vollmers]

Hi, all. I've got a problem with my NFS mounts. I have set up the NFS server (on the unix server) to export the directories /home and /download, which are both on our RAID drive. The permissions are read/write for everyone. These are mounted on our NT workstations as local directories. I have the NFS client set up (also on the server) to mount up dirctories from the NT stations. These are also read/write. I have not had any problems before with this. Last night, our network guy was swapping a switch and hopping network cables around. Now, I can write a file from /home/temp to one of the nt mounts (/engpro1/temp, for example) but it hangs and will not write a file from /engpro1/temp to /home/temp. the drives are mounted fine, as far as the NT is concerned (I can browse, open, etc, just not write). SAM says that the client and server are enabled and that the RAID mounted drives have full read/write. I can't find anything that changed except the cables, and we have everything talking nice now, so I don't know how that could be an issue. I have done a shutdown, so all services, etc have been started up fresh. Any ideas on why I can't write? Thanks.

Mark

[Volker Borowski]

Hi Mark,

swapping cables usally does not affect NFS-permissions. Only thing I can think of, is some name-resolution stuff.

I.e. if you permitted rw with a list of stationnames, and your box can not resolve the names now, so in effect, it is not able to permit write.

Esp. NT is somewhat strange, because if DNS fails, it tends to use WINS without asking someone if it really should, and a WINS-database might be outdated.

Would be nice to see the /etc/exports file.
What product are you using on the NT-side?

Volker

[Shannon Petry]

The easiest way to see if it's a UNIX or NT problem is to mount the exported directory on the UNIX server, as if it were a client.
I.E.
mkdir /test_export
mount server:/export /test_export
touch /test_export/testfile

If this works, then the problem is on the NT side. If not, report back the error that the server gives you!

Regards,
Shannon

[Mark Vollmers]

attached is the /etc/exports file.

I thought of another thing that probably has some bearing on this. I upgraded from 10.20 to 11.0. It took me a bit of time to get the NIS stuff set up so that I could connect from the NT stations (we use a program called Diskaccess to mount the unix directories, and diskshare to share the nt folders to unix). I set up some of the others users when I reboot their NT stations to install some software. Mine I didn't touch, becuase, well, it's mine, and I'll get around to it. I was downloading programs to install to UNIX on the nt and saving them to /home (mounted as v:\home). My thought is that the connection from the NT to server was validated under the 10.20 OS. today, I had to reboot the nt, and it revalidated my login. now I can read but not write. I thought I had everything set up the same (with the NIS server and all that) but maybe I missed something? just a thought.

Shannon-
I think I did it right. here's what I got (engpro1 is NT name):
cd /
mkdir test_export
mount engpro1:/d/export /test_export
touch /test_export/433942a2.zip

There were no errors or anything.

Mark