[Sheflug] Thanks! NFS problem solved.

[James Wallbank <james [at] xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Everyone,

I'm just mailing to say "THANKS" to the Sheffluggers who responded to my
urgent cries for help as our server conked out. Your help and support is
greatly appreciated, and your suggestions led to significant leads.

In particular:

David H: now I've installed webmin, I can confirm that it rocks! I
certainly won't be installing servers without it in future. And checking
/etc/mtab should have been my first step - thanks for reminding me.

Chris J: I like your method for getting a nauseous quantity of logs
recorded. And amusing way to fill a hard disk - that also yielded useful
clues.

Richard S: The cartoon made me laugh just at the moment when everything
looked blackest - and thanks for your concise explanation of the
distinction between hosts.conf and nsswitch.conf

Dave M: I didn't need to run tcpdump to diagnose the problem in the end,
but that would have been my next step if I hadn't stumbled on the
solution (at 00:50 this morning!).

Matthew C: Reinstalling was a bit drastic - but it had to be done. Now
we have 20GB of spare space in /home, on a separate physical device,
rather than 600mB spare on a device cluttered up with other partitions,
and sshd and webmin running instead of some horribly insecure telnet
server. I'm glad I'm not the only one who doesn't trust admin tools.

So what was the solution?

Simply the insertion of the word "insecure" into /etc/exports. The
server's default behavior (unlike the last one) was not to trust users
who weren't connecting on secure ports, and allow them to read only. Oh,
and I had to learn more about the murky world of YP - which only seemed
to be working when actually it was partly broken.

If anyone can explain to me either (1) How I can define some ports as
"secure" in order to remove that "insecure" flag, or (2) How I can alter
the behavior of the NFS clients so that they only use secure ports or
(3) What book or resource I should read to discover these things, that
would be great.

Cheers all - I'm off to get some sleep.

James
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