*BSD News Article 35881


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From: mcgovern@spoon.beta.com (Brian McGovern)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: xdm and NFS (a curious question)
Date: 16 Sep 1994 17:59:09 GMT
Organization: BETA Mountain, Framingham, MA
Lines: 27
Message-ID: <35cmdd$mp8@sundog.tiac.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: spoon.beta.com

Heres a problem that has been bugging me all day. I have two FreeBSD 1.1.5.1
machines. One with a 380MB SCSI drive, and one with a 116MB IDE drive (this
is not the problem... yet).

On the machine with the 380MB drive, I have installed XFree 2.1, and all the
other stuff, and it works great. In order to conserve disk space, I've
NFS mounted /usr/X386 to the machine with 116 MB of disk space. When I run
xdm, however, it tries to initialize the screen several times, then drops
me back to a shell prompt. Upon doing a ps -ax, I can see xdm still (trying to)
run.

However, if I unmount this directory, and copy the files over, it works
fine.

My initial reaction was that maybe it had something to do with the way NFS
was working. After playing with it for awhile, I found that directories owned
by root, or root-alikes (ie - bin, daemon, etc) I could read fine, but not
write to if I was root, but any directories owned by non-root type users
(ie - I NFS mounted /usr/homes) would allow me to read and write with no
problems at all.

Can I possibly get some input on this, and how to avoid it. I would like it
for both my work and home set of machines.

	Thankx, 
	 Brian