Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Name That Host

So I found that the system I am migrating to as our main file server does not support CIFS well, so I thought I would export via NFS to our server and then via CIFS from there. This would add a nice layer of transparency and allow me to reuse a known configuration.

I ran into problems with Samba needing root access to those mounts in order to get into various 700 directories. I ended up learning a little more about how Solaris handles the rw= and root= arguments on its shares.
Apparently a network defined by an IP address can be specified as "@xx.xx.xx[.0][/x]", so 192.168.1.0/24 could be "@192.168.1", "@192.168.1.0", or "@192.168.1.0/24". This seems nice and flexible.

Individual hosts cannot be specified by IP address. They must be specified by an LDAP name or a fully-qualified domain name. I tried entering the FQN of our Samba server but it still wasn't taking. I checked that nssswitch.conf had "files,dns", but still no luck. Eventually I manually added the host to /etc/hosts and suddenly it works. You have to be careful with the host definitions of these Solaris-based NFS shares. It can be quite picky on what will work.

See Sun's documentation for full, albeit unhelpful, details.

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