Why does nfsroot result in nonzero root user euid?

[David Wuertele]

Stuart, thanks for the reply.

Stuart> On the target you are root, but not when you run stuff of the
Stuart> nfs mounted root.

So the root squash parameter causes the NFS server negotiate with the
client to change its euid, and the client is trusted to do so.  I
wonder why they didn't just have the server do a translation...

This is a problem for me, for two reasons:

1.  in general, it is not good to have behavior of the target system
    be different in the NFS-mounted case and in the native
    storage-mounted case

2.  specifically, when I run a command like "mount" from the
    util-linux package (not the busybox version), it complains that my
    euid isn't zero.  I hope I don't have to rip all that checking
    code out of there just so I can test over NFS!

Stuart> Try adding 'no_root_squash' and remove 'all_squash'.  My
Stuart> entries look like:
Stuart> /my_exported_dir *(rw,no_root_squash)

I'm not as concerned about the security implications as I am about the
inconvenience of having my target spew root-owned files all over my
shared disk.  On my server, I like to have users maintain their own
files, but with root-owned files on the disk that becomes a headache.


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