Subject: NFS and symlinks bug and workaround
From: [email-masked] (Thomas Koenig)
Date: Sat, 4 Jun 1994 18:53:19 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce

There is a weird problem which may bite you if you try to set
up a Linux box either as NFS client or NFS server:  Under
certain circumstances, you get "permission denied" errors
on all symlinks.

Example:

Machine server exports its /usr/bin readonly to client, in server's
/etc/exports, there is the line:

/usr/bin        client(ro)

Say, /usr/bin/vi is a symlink to /usr/bin/elvis on the server:

server:/usr/bin# ls -l vi elvis
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root     bin        103428 Oct 17  1993 elvis*
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root            5 May  5 01:55 vi -> elvis*

Then, when you try the same thing on the client, you get a "permission
denied" error:

client:/usr/bin# ls -l vi
ls: vi: Permission denied
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root         1024 May  4 23:55 vi

A friend told me of a workaround:  remove root's membership from all
supplementary groups on both client and server, (i.e.  delete all
occurences of "root" after the last colon in /etc/group) and restart
your networking stuff.

It works, but don't ask me why :-)
--
Thomas Koenig, [email-masked], [email-masked].
The joy of engineering is to find a straight line on a double
logarithmic diagram.

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