NFS installed, but no access
 

Hi,

I have two Debian machines on a LAN. One is server. the other client. On the client, after mounting "server:/home" I can see all the directories directly under /home in the server. BUT, I cannot see sub-directories below the first level. I can see a few files, BUT cannot see 99% of the files on the server. I do not know why I cannot access the files on the server.

Where can I start to look for the reason for not being able to access the files and directoriees in /home?

elbe3321

It sounds like you have the permissions set so that the user you are running as on the client does not have access to the directories you have exported.

A couple of things to remember:
1) by default, root on the client machine will not have any root like abilities on the mounted directories. This can be changed by exporting the file system on the server with the no_root_squash option.
2) the users will be identified by their user ids (as assigned in /etc/passwd). Just having a user with the same name on the client will not give you access to files owned by a user with the same name on the server, unless the two users have the same user id. For two systems you can synchronize your user ids manually. For more than a few systems, you generally want to use a central authentication tool such as NIS when you use NFS.

Hi idaho,

Many thanks. That was great advice and it solved my problem. Now I need work on installing NIS and all the security issues that come with it.

elbe