Can I Set Up User Name Mapping in Windows Vista?

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Can I Set Up User Name Mapping in Windows Vista?

Unfortunately, no if you don't have a SFU 3.5 or W2K3 R2 machines on the network that is running User Name Mapping service. This has been a major disappointment with NFS deployments using Windows Vista.

However, there is a tiny little good news for you if you are looking for a way to enable Client for NFS in Windows Vista to be able to do something other than anonymous mounts. There is a registry tweak that you can modify to tweak Vista NFS client to use a pair of UNIX UID and GID while mounting and accessing NFS shares.

Here's how you can do it -

  • Start Registry Editor
  • Locate HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ClientForNFS\CurrentVersion\Default
  • Create two DWORD values namely AnonymousUid and AnonymousGid
  • Set these values to the UID and GID you would like this NFS client to use
  • Restart your Client for NFS service using the Microsoft Services for NFS MMC snap-in

Go ahead and mount shares on this machine and now the Client for NFS driver will send those values as the UID and GID to the NFS server. You can also use the mount command without any parameters to verify if these values are being used. You should see something like this -

 C:\>mount

Local    Remote                                 Properties
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
x:       \\NFSSERVER\NFSSHARE                   UID=10012, GID=10011
                                                rsize=8192, wsize=8192
                                                mount=soft, timeout=1.6
                                                retry=1, locking=yes
                                                fileaccess=644, lang=ANSI
                                                casesensitive=no

Try creating a file on the share and on the UNIX box, you can see that they bear the same UID and GID values as we have mentioned in the above DWORD values. If you use the ls command that comes with SUA, you will not see the correct ownership information because the client is still doing anonymous mounts and as you might have guessed already - we are just changing the UID and GID that the client is sending to the server. It is more like squashing from a client side instead of doing it from the server.

There's a security consideration as well - Every user on this machine will start sending these same NFS credentials so if you are going to have multiple users using this machine - think carefully about using this registry tweak. You also will not be able to use any secondary groups. I guess that can also be a consideration for many environments.

BTW, this works the same way on Windows 7 Beta box ;)