NFS permissions question/problem

[Neal Lippman <nl@lippman.org>]

Thanks to all of the help here, I've begun copying my (music) cd's to ogg 
format. This has led me to a problem with nfs, that I was hoping someone 
could shed some light on.

My setup includes a system running as a fileserver. Using NFS, the /home 
directory is exported. That system has an account for each user that has a 
directory under /home; for instance, my account is "nl". On my workstation 
(woody), I of course have my own account, also called nl. Because this is my 
home lan, the number of users is limited, so it is easy enough to ensure that 
everyone has the same uid/gid on both systems, so I haven't implemented any 
centralized user database as of yet. The nfs exported /home partition is 
mounted on the workstation at /nfs; on the workstation, /home/nl is a symlink 
to /nfs/nl, so I get my home directory via nfs from the server. That all 
works fine.

I wanted to store all the music cd's that I am now converting to ogg format 
in a centrally available directory so the can be accessed by other 
workstation in the house, including some win98 machines (the server also runs 
samba). I created (on the server): /home/music to store these files. This 
directory is owned by root, but I made a new group called "music" and set 
that as the group for this directory. I put user nl into group music on the 
server, and created the identical "music" group on the workstation (making 
sure the gid's where the same) as well, and put nl into that group on the 
workstation. The group permission is rwx.

Here's the problem. With the music directory having group music, I cannot 
write into it as nl. When I change the group to "nl", I can. This suggests 
that the nfs process on the server is using only my primary group assignment 
(nl) and not my supplemental groups.

I am wondering if this is the correct analysis, and if so, is this a bug or a 
feature, and how can I work around it?

Thanks.
nl