Hi everybody, first post. Nice to meet you all!

I've got the NFS server running on Debian 3.0r1, and I'm accessing the share from another PC running Slackware 9.1. Everything works the way it should (that is, I can access all the files on the share the way I want to), apart from this weird quirk which I'm hoping someone might be able to shed some light on.

These are the permissions for my /mnt directory on the Slackware box before the NFS share is mounted:

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root cdrw
drwxrwxr-x 6 root users drivers
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root dvd
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root floppy
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root nfs
drwxrwxr-x 7 root users windows

'drivers' and 'windows' are where separate FAT32 partitions are mounted, but the others are just normal directories. This is what the permissions look like after the share is mounted:

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root cdrw
drwxrwxr-x 6 root users drivers
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root dvd
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root floppy
drwxrwsr-x 4 root ftp nfs
drwxrwxr-x 7 root users windows

What's going on here? You can't change the umask in fstab the way you can with the Windows partitions, and I've tried such a large variety of the options set out in the exports, mount and nfs man pages that I can feel my brain turning into jelly . The line in fstab at the moment is just this:

debian:/home /mnt/nfs nfs noauto,user 0 0

I'm hoping it's just some simple thing that I've overlooked. Does anyone have any ideas?

For linux type partitions, If you want to change the owner, group (chown owner:group /mnt/nfs), or permissions of the file system, you do so after mounting the partition. For other file systems such as vfat or smbfs, you need to add a gid= or uid= option in the /etc/fstab entry.
Look at the man pages for the mount command. Different filesystems use different options.

Already tried it - doesn't work. Won't let you change permissions while the share is mounted, and if you unmount, chown/chmod and remount they just go right back to what they were. As I said, I've tried most of the general and nfs-specific commands in the mount man page - no joy.

when you mount the partition is should be assuming the permissions set for the remote share. it's not using /mnt/nfs as a normal directory, but as a mount point, so will change the shares and such. you should find that the permissions it changes to match that of the remote server

Done it - thanks acid, that really helped.

This is what was confusing me:

On my Debian machine, /home was owned by root staff. The gid of 'staff' is 50. I had originally discounted the possibility of the permissions for the remote share overriding those of the mount point because there's no 'ftp' group on the Debian box. But guess what? A closer look in /etc/group on Slackware revealed that the gid of 'ftp' is... 50. So NFS is mapping the not only the directory permissions of the share, but also the user and group ids of the owners. Now I start to realise why NFS is regarded as being so insecure...