[sclug] Linux to linux file sharing

[Drew McLellan]

Drew McLellan wrote:
> James Fidell wrote:
> 
>> Quoting Drew McLellan (lists at allinthehead.com):
>>
>>> Unfortunately, the way NFS handles permissions leaves a lot to be 
>>> desired. Basically it would seem ignore groups and file ownership, 
>>> and rely totally on file permissions. I'm not really keen on making 
>>> all the files world writable.
>>
>> I'm not sure the above paragraph actually makes sense, but it looks like
>> you're doing it wrong.  NFS fully implements user/group/world file
>> access rights, modulo any modification made via mount/export options.
>>
>> I suggest you post examples of your configuration and explain what 
>> doesn't
>> work.
> 
> On the server I have an export which looks like this:
> 
> /home/files      (insecure,rw)
> 
> Obviously I've not got as far as nailing this down to a specific IP 
> address or range yet. Keeping it simple for troubleshooting.
> 
> Everything under /home/files belongs to the group 'company' (1001) and 
> is owned by my user (1000).
> 
> On the workstation, I have a user with the same name and id (1000), 
> ditto with the group. I can successfully mount the export:
> 
> mount server:/home/files /mnt/files
> 
> I can read the files in the export, but not modify. I believe it 
> *should* work because:
> 
> a) the user has the same ID on the client and the server
> b) if I ssh into the server as that user, I can modify
> 
> But obviously I'm missing a trick.
> 
> Thanks for any help you can offer on this.

Sorry to follow up on my own post, but I thought it was worth explaining 
the solution I found.

In Debian Sarge, there are two different NFS server packages:

nfs-user-server
nfs-kernel-server

Apparently the user-server is more fully featured, but slower. The 
kernel-server is, as you'd expect, a faster a kernel extension.

In reality, the kernel-server is the one which functions, and the 
user-server is the one which would appear to be totally broken.

I removed user-server, installed kernel-server and It Just Worked.

Thanks all for the various bits of input. Much appreciated.

drew.