NFS, automount, etc.

How do I let a user log in to a Mac or FreeBSD
and have his/her home directory NFS mounted
from the main Mac?

Before I crashed and rebuilt my disk,
I had the Mac mounting directories from
a FreeBSD host. But I never succeeded
in going the other way.

To make it work, I had to turn off the
$%^&%^& automounter, which seemed to take
the attitude, "I don't care WHAT you put
in fstab, the correct mount point is
/Volumes/whatever, and I WILL make soft links
with permissions errors in my directory,
no matter what you say!"

OK, rant over, bottom line is with the
automounter OFF, it worked.

Now, I set up exports and fstab the same as before,
loaded them into NetInfo, and did mount -a

Again got the stupid permission denied messages
on /automount/servers/Users/userID

So, again, I turn off the automounter and try again.

Now, it's
NFS Portmap: RPC: Port mapper failure - RPC: Timed out

This is 10.3.9 I want all my users to have ONE
home directory, not one on each Mac. So the smaller
Mac has an empty directory for ech user (except Admin)
and an fstab to mount the real dir on the other machine.

Oh, and I put "mount -a" in one of the startup items.
That gets them mounted _before_ anyone logs in.
At least it did before the crash.

The reason for that is the Finder is too stupid to
recognize when an empty directory gets mounted.

 

To put it another way, IF it were Solaris or
FreeBSD or HPUX, etc. the following would work:

Server> echo "/Developer -rw -alldirs -maproot=nobody
-network=192.168.xx.0 -mask=255.255.255.0" > /etc/exports

ssh -l admin Client

Client> su -

Client> echo "Server:/Users/username /Users/username nfs rw 0 0" \
then cycle mountd and "mount -a" or reboot, etc.

What to do in OS X? Some web pages I've read
suggest I have to learn LDAP and do all sorts
of weird stuff with that. Others say it can't
be done in OS X (which I don't believe).

 

Look at the "automount" software. "Amd" (automount daemon) is also
available on OS X (and is used in FreeBSD, and available for just
about any Unix), but I don't know how well it works.

The web site for amd is:

http://www.am-utils.org/

 

I'll look into 'amd' but unless someone can tell me
EXACTLY what to do to make Apple's 'automount' work,
AND I verify that it actually works, I will continue
to believe that it is crap.

("work", by the way, means I can mount something on a path
that does NOT start with "/Volumes/", NOT get errors
that include paths starting with "automount" and ending
with "permission denied", and NOT have network icons
in Finder that say "original can't be found" when you
click on them)

When I turned off the automounter, all my FreeBSD
directories were always available on the Mac. But
with or without automount, I NEVER got the Mac to
share the other way.

(BTW, this is not an anti-Apple rant. I really
like OS X. It's just that this one feature sucks.)

 

ipfw is somehow failing to read some of the rules in the
firewall file. Specifically, the rules designed to
exempt all machines on the local network from the later
rles that keep out stuff from the rest of the internet.
Nothing wrong with the file syntax--I can cut and paste
the exact same rules at the command line and ipfw honors them.

After reboot, ipfw list shows rule 0010, 0074, 0075, and on.

Rules 0020, 0030, 0040, 0050, 0060, 0070, 0071, 0072, 0073
are not there. "head /etc/firewall.conf" and cut/paste the
rules, and then 'ipfw list' will show them--and NFS to FreeBSD
disks works.

?!?!?!?

Now to try the Mac-to-Mac shares.......