On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 8:41 AM, Nicolas Williams
<Nicolas.Williams at sun.com> wrote:
> On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 01:53:15PM -0700, Dru Devore wrote:
>> How can I share a zfs pool with nfs without putting the clients in the
>> hosts file?
>>
>> I am sharing a pool for backup at home and am using dns if my router
>> is reset my ip addresses can change so I would have to modify the
>> hosts file. I want to simply allow anyone on the network be able to
>> mount the nfs drive.
>
> It has never been the case that you must be able to resolve client IP
> addresses to names on the NFS server. ?(Though it does try to resolve
> them; dangling DNS delegations used to cause rpc.mountd to hang.)
I thought that was the case too, but recently I had problems with
getting my Mac to mount NFS filesystems from SXCE. I'm not sure if
it's because the Mac's IP changed or because SX did, but suddenly I
had to make sure I could reverse-lookup the client on the server.
In fact, just to check, I just changed my client's IP address to one
that does not have a reverse lookup entry and it fails with a message
on the mac that says "Could not connect to the server because the name
or password is not correct" - hardly helpful.
When I first worked this out I managed to turn some extra logging on
on the server end and it was clearly pointing to reverse lookup
problems. I can't for the life of me work out what I did now... I
thought it was a debug option to mountd but editing the start method
to include -v seems not to help now.
This paragraph in the man page for mountd seems to indicate that some
checking is done:
Some routines that compare hostnames use case-sensitive
string comparisons; some do not. If an incoming request
fails, verify that the case of the hostname in the file to
be parsed matches the case of the hostname called for, and
attempt the request again.
Thing is, I *know* I've done mounts in the past from clients without
reverse lookup entries, so I wonder what's changed.
Oh, and to the OP: in my experience, you don't need entries in
/etc/inet/hosts, working reverse entries in DNS seem to be good
enough.
Boyd
