[ILUG] NFS help, please - exporting and mounting /home

[William Murphy]

Cormac McClean wrote:

>
> I can mount this from a PC on the network as
>         mount 193.1.31.83:/home /nfs_test
> and I can see the contents of this directory:
>         cormac
>         lost+found
> I can also see the contents of the lost+found
> directory.
>
> However, when I look at /home/cormac, it reports
> that the directory is empty:
>         ls -l /nfs_test/cormac (i.e. /home/cormac)
>         total 0
>
> Is this because this is a user's home directory?
> If so, how do I export it and mount it?
>
> I have acquired a copy of Managing NIS and NFS,
> but it does not appear to cover this issue.

Well, chances are that root squashing is on. This means that root probably has
the same privelidges as nobody for looking at files. The effect of this is
that you can't see any files in a readonly directory. You can turn off root
squashing by adding no_root_squash to the line in /etc/exports (and restarting
your nfsd) for example:
/home (rw,no_root_squash)

This raises the security consideration that anyone who has root on the client
machine can read (or modify in the above example) anyone elses files.

Anyway,
William Murphy
alias at eircom.net