Re: tar/NFS problem

[Michael Heironimus <mkh01@earthlink.net>]

On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 01:24:45AM +0100, Piers Kittel wrote:
> Bascially, I've got 2 computers, one which is my main PC (named desire), 
> and the other is a server (named destiny).  I'd like the server to 
> backup the /home/piers directory from the main PC.  The server is 
> accessing the main PC by NFS and desire:/home is moutned on 
> destiny:/home/desire.  I've put in the following line in the crontab 
> file on destiny:
> 
> 00 4 * * 0 root rm -f /home/desirebackup/home_backup.tar; tar cf 
> /home/desirebackup/home_backup.tar /home/desire/piers
> 
> but when I tested out the "tar cf /home/desirebackup/home_backup.tar 
> /home/desire/piers" I get a lot of "Permissions denied" errors although 
> some files are read OK. (An example is "tar: /home/desire/piers/.mcoprc: 
> Read error at byte 0, reading 31 byes: Permission denied")

It looks like you're using root to run your backup. Normally root is
remapped to nobody ("root squashing") on NFS mounts for security
reasons, so root won't have permission to read files that aren't
world-readable. In the /etc/exports file on the server you can add the
no_root_squash option to allow root access on an exported filesystem.
See the man page on exports for details.

-- 
Michael Heironimus