IPC <-> Ultrix NFS problem - solution (summ

[Daniel Baldoni]

Recently, I asked about a problem I was having getting NFS talking between
a VAX Ultrix and a couple of IPC's running SunOS 4.1.1.  I'm VERY happy to
say that the problem has now been rectified thanks to information passed
on to me by a couple of net-readers (to whom I am eternally grateful
<smile>).

Basically, Ultrix seems to have an "access group limit" of 8 (SUN-OS is
reputed to have one of 16).  "What the !#%$ is this?" you ask.  Well, if a
user who tries to access the Ultrix-exported file system belongs to more
than 8 groups, you get an RPC Authentication error.  And, guess what?
root just happens to be in all 16 groups on our SUN's.

So the simple solution is to remove root from all entries in /etc/group.
Now, this may get a little confusing as root is implicitly in every group
anyhow, right?  Well, I guess that explicit group lists are retained if a
username is actually mentioned in the /etc/group file.  I'm not too keen
on the implementation if this is the case.

I'd like to thank both Mike Iglesias (iglesias at draco.acs.uci.edu) and Ric
Anderson (ric at cs.arizona.edu) for this invaluable piece of information.

I'd also like to thank Brian Kelley (brian at cimage.com) for pointing out
that it is essential to have your hostnames in /etc/exports agreeing with
the remote hosts which are doing the mounting.  This wasn't a problem in
my case but I can imagine some poor administrator at a large site
suffering from this.

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