[plug] Setting up NFS for backups.

[Richard Mortimer]

Greetings Folks,

I'm a relative newbie after working on Linux a couple of years ago, then
working (battling?) on M$ servers, and now back to Linux. Hi to anyone that
remembers my small contributions to PLUG previously.

I currently have two servers set up, mail and web, with a tape unit on web.

I wish to share out the root and complete filesystem from mail via NFS to
back up important and changing files on mail.

My /etc/export file on mail reads:
# filesystems to export ...
/ web(rw,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check)

My entry in the /etc/fstab file on web reads:
mail:/  /mnt/mail  nfs rsize=8192,wsize=8192,hard,intr,rw 0 0

Whilst I can see the majority of the filesystem on mail, it seems to be
blocking the mail /var directory, which contains the
/var/spool/mail/USERNAME - one of the directories I wish to be backed up.

I've been reading the man pages on exports, nfs, mount and umount, but I
can't seem to see the answer in there - I'm having a wild guess that this is
some security feature that I can't see reference to (although I was under
the impression that the no_subtree_check flag turned off the repressing on
'root owned' directories.), which means I'm trying to do something that
shouldn't be done, or I need to read further.

Can anyone point my feeble mind to the right man page to rectify this, or
alternatively, to something which outlines the security implications so I
can make an informed decision on how to restructure my backup strategy.

Thanks

Richard



J. Richard Mortimer - webmaster
web: www.netfire.com.au