think tank forum

this is the configuration of my OpenBSD 4.3 NFS server:

rc.conf.local

portmap=YES
nfs_server=YES
mountd_flags="-n"

the -n mountd flag is supposed to "not require that clients make mount requests from reserved ports."

exports

/share 10.0.1.3

drwxrwxrwx   2 brain  brain      512 Aug 22 11:58 share/

I can mount the NFS share with mount_nfs -P crashoverride:/share /mnt on the OS X client, but without the -P flag it gives me mount_nfs: /mnt: Permission denied.

I'd like to be able to mount the share from the OS X Finder interface and I can't pass the -P flag from there. for some reason the -n flag to mountd doesn't seem to be working. there used to be a sysctl for this but it seems to be gone. any ideas?

What does the -P flag do?

sorry, forgot to define that :).

Use a reserved socket port number.  This is useful for mounting
             servers that require clients to use a reserved port number on the
             mistaken belief that this makes NFS more secure. (For the rare
             case where the client has a trusted root account but untrustwor-
             thy users and the network cables are in secure areas this does
             help, but for normal desktop clients this does not apply.)

There's no such thing as ``mountd_flags'' on OpenBSD (Atleast not in 4.3).
Look at /etc/rc, line 396

Try killing mountd and manually starting it from the console, you can put something like this in /etc/rc.conf.local :

kill `cat /var/run/mountd.pid`
mountd -n

same deal:

on the server:

# ps -aux | grep mountd
root     21418  0.0  0.3   532   432 ??  Ss     5:03PM    0:00.00 mountd -n

and client:

# mount_nfs crashoverride:/share /mnt
mount_nfs: /mnt: Permission denied

Hmm, anything in the logs on the server?

nothing, but I'm trying mountd with debugging enabled now.

interesting. mountd seems to think the mount was successful. OS X is still telling me permission denied.

Got mount request from 10.0.1.3
rpcpath: /share
Mount successful for /share by 10.0.1.3.

that output is no different if I run mount_nfs with the -P flag.

running mountd without the -n flag also changes nothing. it still says "Mount successful" when I don't use the -P flag.

Hm, odd ...

Did you try to connect with a different OS (i.e. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, Solaris, etc.)? You can use a LiveCD ...

A different OS will do it. I've jumped on the bandwagon on trying to iron out this issue. I wasted 3 hours on it. Starting every service manually(along with verification from the remote client with rpcinfo). I have Leopard as my OS X install and still getting similar results.

Since I do have access to VMWare and I've been fuckin with RHEL, I have been able to successfully mount NFS shares(albeit with insecure flags) from those machines. OpenBSD's privileged ports are what is mainly causing the issue. Hopefully there will be a fix.

As an alternative, you can use AutoFS on Leopard to mount the NFS share with the -P flag. However, this raises the concern of mounting as a user. Life is so complicated.

I posted this to the mailing list and got this response .

I'll try it out later. hopefully I can do 'noauto' in fstab so it won't try to mount it when I'm not at home.

Any follow up to this?

I kind of lost interest after it was such a pain :/. I don't even have a file server anymore, haha.