Sharing folders over NFS

Sharing folders over NFS 

It’s easy – right click on the folder you to share and go to properties on this folder. You should now be able see a new tab called “NFS Sharing”. Here’s how it looks like –

Remember that we have not yet set up User Name Mapping so Server for NFS will treat all access request as anonymous access, we need to click the checkbox which says “Allow anonymous access”. The default UID and GID used for anonymous users and groups are -2 and -2.
These values are also used for unmapped users and groups accessing the shares over NFS (even when anonymous access is not allowed on the NFS share). For example, if you delete a user or an advanced mapping and if some files are owned by that user, they be shown as owned by 4294967294.

Next thing you should do is to click on the Permissions button and open the NFS Share permissions window. This window allows you configure the host-based access list for this share –

This is the place where you can add and change the access type for any given client group. Client groups are nothing but the groups of systems which you want to grant same type of access.
ALL MACHINES is the default client group which controls access to everyone else who is not part of any other client groups you might have defined or will define in the future.

You can create client groups using the nfsadmin command line tool -
nfsadmin server [ ComputerName ] creategroup GroupName

And, you can add NFS clients to existing client groups using this syntax -
nfsadmin server [ ComputerName ] addmembers GroupName Member [, Member ...]

To proceed, I have changed the access for ALL MACHINES client group to Read-Write. You can also change the encoding here – available encodings are ANSI (that's default – which you would use unless you have a valid reason to change to one of these – BIG5/EUC-JP/EUC-KR/EUC-TW/GB2312-80/KSC5601/Shift-JIS).

If you check the Allow root access check box shown in the image above, you are setting up no_root_squash on this share. When this option is set, users with UID 0 (zero) coming from the clients are treated as root instead of being treated as anonymous users.

As a result, though you can mount the folder on the NFS client, you will not be able to access it. To get it work, you need to map your UNIX root user to Administrator (or a Domain Administrator) user on the Windows system.