O’Reilly Media book: Managing NFS and NIS, 2nd Edition

From the publisher:

A modern computer system that’s not part of a network is even more of an anomaly today than it was when we published the first edition of this book in 1991. But however widespread networks have become, managing a network and getting it to perform well can still be a problem.Managing NFS and NIS, in a new edition based on Solaris 8, is a guide to two tools that are absolutely essential to distributed computing environments: the Network Filesystem (NFS) and the Network Information System (formerly called the “yellow pages” or YP).The Network Filesystem, developed by Sun Microsystems, is fundamental to most Unix networks. It lets systems ranging from PCs and Unix workstations to large mainframes access each other’s files transparently, and is the standard method for sharing files between different computer systems.As popular as NFS is, it’s a “black box” for most users and administrators. Updated for NFS Version 3, Managing NFS and NIS offers detailed access to what’s inside, including:

  • How to plan, set up, and debug an NFS network
  • Using the NFS automounter
  • Diskless workstations
  • PC/NFS
  • A new transport protocol for NFS (TCP/IP)
  • New security options (IPSec and Kerberos V5)
  • Diagnostic tools and utilities
  • NFS client and server tuning

NFS isn’t really complete without its companion, NIS, a distributed database service for managing the most important administrative files, such as the passwd file and the hosts file. NIS centralizes administration of commonly replicated files, allowing a single change to the database rather than requiring changes on every system on the network.If you are managing a network of Unix systems, or are thinking of setting up a Unix network, you can’t afford to overlook this book.

This book is rather focusing on Solaris, I still think, THIS IS THE BOOK, but then I really did not research the market before acquiring this book. E.g. regarding “exportfs”: the command just gets mentioned in a table, no further explanations. Right, the “current” main author was mostly on Sun’s payroll, but O’Reilly’s could have “forced” a more Linux/AIX/… oriented co-author on board of the authors.

I acquired this book, when I had trouble making use

  • of a Synology DiskStation NAS as a server
  • and an openSUSE Linux VM as a client.

True, I am not using NIS.

True, my server and my client don’t have the same values for corresponding users (UIDs). Should I better “chown -R …” the respective users’ directory trees on the NAS in order to achieve the proper UID mapping?!?

My NFS server does not accept “root=…”.

Is making brute force use of “anonuid=…” on the server side (mapping all accesses from outside to a single user w/o further proper authentication) the only (and admittedly unappropriate) way to achieve my goal then? Yes, I do have an idea of what anonuid should be used for.

AFS and Samba seem to be able to deal with user accounts, that do not have the same UIDs on both sides – how to deal with that in the NFS context w/o NIS?!?

My notes following the TOC:

Chapter 6 covers basic NFS operations, such as mounting and exporting filesystems.

  • commands: exportfs, …
  • system files: …

Chapter 13. Network Diagnostic and Administrative Tools

  • commands: showmount, …
  • NIS maps: …
  • system files: …

Chapter 14. NFS Diagnostic Tools

  • commands: showmount, …

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