Grrr....exports stupidities under 4.0.1

[William LeFebvre]

Now it wouldn't be all that unusual to want to export a given partition
as read-only to a whole bunch of machines and read-write to a small
number of machines, would it?  Let's see how difficult Sun makes it for
us.

Let's say that I have two netgroups:  cs and ee.  I also have a file
system that I want all the cs machines to have read-write access to.
But, some people in the ee group also need access to it.  Since they
only want to read from that partition, I'd like to set it up so they
can't mount it read/write.  This just makes me feel like I have more
control over the systems I manage.

Well, a quick glance at exports(5) leads me to use the following entry:

	/dir	-ro,access=cs:ee,rw=cs

"Hey, wow," I say, "this exports stuff is pretty simple to use."

But woe is me when exportfs says "cs: unknown host."  Closer scrutiny
of exports(5) unearths the obscure but important fact that netgroups
can *only* be used in the "access" option.

Just for kicks I tried two separate entries for the same file system.
As I suspected, it only paid attention to one of them.

So what this boils down to is that you can only specify one set of
netgroups per file system, and that entire set must have identical
mount privileges.  This does not sit well with me.  Not in the least.

And before some wise guy tells me that I can just list all the hosts I
need in the "rw=" option ("rw=a:b:c:d:...") let me say that, in our
case, there are almost 60 hosts in the cs netgroup, and it does change
from time to time.  I am *not* going to do that!

I also see no provisions for wild-carding domain names, as in
"*.cs.rice.edu", which would be an interesting alternative to those
deprived of using netgroups.

So there really is no way to have different mounting privileges for
different netgroups.  Maybe I'm weird, but I sure think that would be a
useful feature (and not particularly hard, either).

Gee, thanks Sun!

			William LeFebvre
			Sun-Spots moderator
			Department of Computer Science
			Rice University
			<phil at Rice.edu>