NFS on Slackware, I'm kind of lost at setting it up
 

Hi All,

I read this tutorial

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...rking/Easy_NFS

I thought I did everything right, but I can't get the installer from SUSE 10.1-GM that a different friend of mine is having me load in for him to see it and work.

Don't go too hard on him, at least he's letting me load some kind of linux on his computer :D

But I get error's of access denied or directory not available on the SUSE installer.

Does that tutorial apply to us? I do have NFS enabled in my kernel. And I went into package tool and told it to turn on portmap.

I've read that I should really have my linux boxes talking to each other over NFS and not Samba for better "flow" so that's why I'm posting, not just the install SUSE thingie. Worst comes to worst I'll just burn them down and install it. But I really should get a handle on this NFS.

Thanks in advance.

Hey fogie.

Sorry 'bout the email thing. Working long days right now, going to sleep now.

But check this out:
Link
Helped me out big time

I was keying in user name and pass on that SUSE installer, there is no option for me to set the uid:gid maybe that is holding me out :(

So NFS doesn't allow you to authenticate by "username" and "pass" but it also looks at those, nice for security, but a pain for what I'm trying to achieve at the moment.

Does that Suse installer want an NFS server where it can find the installation files? And did you setup a NFS server on your Slackware box for that purpose? If so, did you make "/etc/rc.d/rc.nfsd" executable and ran it? I wanted to post the NFS instructions from my wiki but cwwilson721 was ahead of me :-)

NFS does not need and will not ask for usernames/passwords, so the fact that you are asked to enter those, would indicate that (1) Suse asks for passwords every time it gets "access denied" or (2) you try to access a Samba share instead?

Eric

Hi Eric,

I had them both on, as it was already in a folder that I shared on the network, so I thought it would be ok. Now maybe having it both ways reared it's ugly head on me. Okay the, I'm going to turn off samba and see how it goes. I'll repost back. Thanks for the tip.

OKAY. It didnt work for SUSE. So for kicks and giggles, knowing that this computer here is already empty of data and all. I threw in the slack-current-iso-disc-1 as made by you Eric, brought up the pcmcia, brought up networking, told slack installer to use install by NFS and what do you know....it works in the same directory with SAMBA and NFS on.

So as usual..Slackware works and SUSE does what ever the heck it wants!! So my NFS does work :D

Oh well, I think I'll try and do SUSE over a designated guest only samba share :( argh I hate the thought of it...and if that dont work then I'll burn down the cd's and waste 2 bux as their installer grabs something from all 5 cd's in stead of placing them all on one or two.

Okay I got SUSE install over network with the SAMBA. their NFS must be messed up on their install cd.

I wrote a little how to for the SUSE'rs here in the forums. 27 views and noone at SUSE forums here even knew how to do this. OMG I'm so glad I don't use SUSE, as this should be common knowledge, it should be on suse's site, and every suse for newb's website that I found.

Just in case you guys get stuck putting SUSE on your friend's pc and don't want to waste your money to burn cd's or your time to watch Yast take all day installing:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...70#post2247070

Thanks again Eric, the fact that you mentioned about the passprompt really pointed me to what was going on here.

Now I'm off to go do NFS here for the house hold.

leave it to a Slackware user to fix another distro's problem. :) Good job fogie.

regards,
...drkstr

The thing to keep in mind when you want to use NFS in a LAN, is that on every PC, you will need to create user accounts whose names have the same user-ids or UIDs.
E.g. user "alien" on computer one has a UID of 1000; to make NFS work, a user account "alien" on all other PC's should also have UID 1000. If you fail to setup your user accounts like this, the files that you share over NFS will be "hi-jacked" by other user accounts, so that you can not access your own data when it is stored on another PC where your account has a different UID.

To find out the numerical UID and GID (group-id) for your and other accounts, run or This will help you in finding out if everything is OK on the UID front.
Corporate LANs achieve centralization of logon accounts by running NIS or LDAP on their servers (where the user databases are stored) and the desktops (where the authentication takes place). For a home network, NIS could be feasible to setup, LDAP is one bridge too far IMO. If you only have a few PC's, it's best to just make sure you create accounts that have the same UID on each PC.

Eric

What would happen if I created files a while ago, then let's say my hard drive dies. I restore from an image, and the uid was different and I could not remember what the uid was. Would I lose access to those files, or could I simply get to them as root and pass on the ownership?

I was restoring backed up files from an NFS drive and I had users on both computers with same name but different uid. When I mounted the drive and did 'ls -l' it displayed the uid as owner instead of the username which tipped me off to the problem. As a work around, you could just create an account on the client as the same uid as the back up files by viewing the owner of the file (displayed as uid if no user exists by that ID). I'm assuming this image was on the NFS server? I'm not positive, but I think any changing of permissions/ownership for the files must be done on the computer hosting the file.

regards,
...drkstr

Yes. Simply run (for instance) as root on that computer where the ownership is wrong. In the above example, you will get the names for your account "user_name" by running the command on that computer.
For my account alien, that command looks like follows:
Getting the names for "uid" and "gid", I would have to run if my homedirectory had incorrent ownership, to set it all right.

Eric

OK thank you guys. I printed that out and put it in my linux notebook over here. I may? be lucky as I've been using Samba, but like everyone advises I need to go NFS. I think I'm going to make sure all my pc's have the same as you suggest, then run an image so if I restore I don't have to do that. But good to know just in case.

By the way, that's brings me to another issue, but on topic of restoring. What do you gent's use to make images of Linux partitions. I've been using Powerquest Drive Image Version 7.0 & 6. It's good, however, I can only compress images of ext3 or ext2. I can't compress a Reiser file system. So I'm not running reiser because of that. Tho from what I read at the reiser site, version 4 is out and they claim it to be better than sliced bread.

Also, Since I was a windows user, I've been using partition magic for years. Now I've been using cfdisk for making and deleting partitions. I really like cfdisk, clean mean and straight to the point. Can that cfdisk make reiser FS, I don't see it in the slackware cfdisk? And can cfdisk resize partitions, and keep data intact? Or should I go with another application for that?

cfdisk does not create filesytems, just partition types.

cfdisk does not resize. parted is for resizing (it's in /extra on the cd's or the website)

I think 'mkfs' is what you are looking for. IE 'mkfs.ext2', 'mkfs.ext3', 'mkfs.reiserfs', etc. You may need to get the reserfs plugin for it if it is not already supported by your system.

regards,
...drkstr