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From: newton@cleese.apana.org.au (Mark Newton)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: pwd problem with NFS
Date: 1 Sep 1994 19:06:21 +0930
Organization: cleese.apana.org.au Public Access UNIX +61-8-3736006
Lines: 54
Message-ID: <3447al$4mg@cleese.apana.org.au>
References: <BLYMN.94Aug29125622@mallee.awadi.com.au>
NNTP-Posting-Host: cleese.apana.org.au
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL8]
In article <BLYMN.94Aug29125622@mallee.awadi.com.au>, Brett Lymn (blymn@awadi.com.au) wrote:
> Dave> I've checked all the permissions and I have read and
> Dave> search all these directories ( including / ), my user id's
> Dave> are the same on all three machines. I tried exporting the
> Dave> file systems with -root=0 and the same thing happens.
> No you have not checked all the permissions ;-) Unmount the nfs
> mounted file systems and check the permissions on the underlying
> mountpoints, if they are not read-execute for everyone then you will
> get the strange messages you have been seeing.
Dave should also check to make sure that the mountpoint is actually a
file!
Back in my University days, one of the Sun SPARCservers always
said, "/var/adm/lastlog: Permission denied" whenever you fingered at
it. The rest of the finger info would come up ok (except for last
login times), but the message was still annoying.
Nobody could work out what it was.
/var/adm was a symlink to ../usr/adm. I could "ls /usr/adm/lastlog",
but I couldn't "cd /var; ls -l ../usr/adm/lastlog" without getting
Permission Denied errors.
I then noticed that "ls .." in /var returned "No such file or directory",
and that an "ls -al" listing in /var contained a directory entry for "."
but not for ".." !
Curious!
I tried an experiment on my old MINIX system at home: I mounted a
filesystem on a plain file (something like "touch /foobar;
mount /dev/sd0a /foobar"). From /foobar, I found that ".." didn't
exist (because .. is inherited from the directory you're using as a
mountpoint, of course!)
I told the sysadmins at uni about my discoveries. Next time the machine
was in single-user mode, they umounted /var and found that someone
had created a symlink from /var pointing at /usr during installation.
Then they changed their mind and created a /var filesystem, but they
didn't bother to change the mountpoint from a symlink to a directory
befor e completing the installation.
Filesystems can be wierd.
- mark
--
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I tried an internal modem, newton@cleese.apana.org.au
but it hurt when I walked. Mark Newton
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