We recently switched a mail server from userland nfsd to kernel nfsd in
order to provide file locking and prevent corruption of mailboxes that was
occuring when multiple servers attempted to update a mailbox simultaneously.
We've run into some very strange behavioral problems with knfsd relative
to userland nfsd.
Particularly, we have a directory, /var/smartlist with a bunch of
subdirectories for each mail list. The directory and subdirectories are owned
by smartlst.smartlist with modes 771.
This directory resides on the Linux server with knfsd, (formerly userland
nfsd) and is exported to other mail servers and a shell server which happens to
be running SunOS 4.1.4.
Inside the list subdirectories are various smartlist files owned by users
such as the 'dist' (distribution) file. With the userland nfsd, users on the
shell server could edit their files in the smartlist subdirectories.
When we upgraded to knfsd, the user can no longer modify files that exist
in the directory even though they have write permission to those files and the
files already exist. This is really broken and requires that we change the
ownership of the subdirectories to the user to make this work. This is
something we don't want to do as we don't want the user removing other files in
the directory.
Was this behavioral change intentional or just a screw-up? And if it is
intentional, what logic dictated that permissions should work differently under
NFS than they do on a local file system?
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon May 15 2000 - 21:00:12 EST