On 11/22/05, DJA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> My first clue was with NFS. I have a modest home LAN consisting normally
> of four, and sometimes as many as six computers. Most all persistent
> data is contained on one box (named Seven) which is a dedicated
> NFS/Samba file server. All users (my wife and me, and a couple of VPN
> users, plus some transient user space) have their own private storage
> space in the file server's /home directory which is accessible from any
> workstation (or VPN connection) via either NFS or Samba. There are also
> some shared directories in /home (the /home/everyone/download directory
> being the largest stack of Stuff).
>
> What I found was that there were occasional problems when a user added
> to Seven whose name was appropriately the same as a user on another box
> (for example Ma-ah), did not have the same Group ID on both Seven and
> Ma-ah. We ended up with odd permission problems when joeuser logged into
> Ma-ah and tried to access something belonging to Seven's joeuser.
> Apparently, NFS (and Samba?) were referencing users and groups by their
> numerical names - which sometimes didn't match.
To shorten a long story. Unix-like operating systems determine file
ownership by UID and group ownership by GID. (numeric values) The
mapping between people-friendly user names and UID is done in
/etc/passwd. The mapping between people-friendly group names and GID
is done in /etc/group.
If you have /etc/passwd and /etc/group files that are different on
different systems, that is just a source of confusion and trouble.
All of the above can be superseded by NIS or other distributed
identification systems.
carl
--
carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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