FTP irregularities on Suns from different hosts

[Gary Faulkner]

We just encountered a rather interesting problem with FTP to Suns from
different remote locations:

First of all, the home directories of the users in question are
subdirectories of the following directory:

drwxr-x--- 16 root     xxxxx         512 Jul 28 06:44 /home/net/oper/yyyyy

(xxxxx represents the group which all users belong to and yyyyy has been
substituted for the actual directory name to "protect the innocent."  
Anyway, the user attempts to logon from a remote machine which is both
unregistered (i.e. not in any hosts table), and not in the domain of the
suns we are attempting to ftp to.  Anyway, when the user attempts to 
ftp to the Suns with the protections set as above (750), the sun complains
that it cannot change directory to the users home directory and prevents
logon.  Now, the user can ftp to a cray running unicos 5.0 (the suns run
4.0 sunos) without any problems (this host is registered AND in the same 
domain as the suns) and then to the suns without problems.  To put another
wrench in the works, if we change the protections to 755, the user can
ftp to the suns with no problems.  

The other important information here is that the file system which contains
these home directories are NFS partitions mounted from a secure host (no 
normal user is allowed to signon), and root maps to nobody.

Is there any other way to allow these ftp's without the 755 permissions?
What is going on here?  Why the difference between hosts?

As always, any help is appreciated.  I hope I have filled in enough detail
here.


Gary Faulkner
National Center for Supercomputing Applications - University of Illinois
Internet: garyf at mehlville.ncsa.uiuc.edu
Disclaimer:  I've only stated my opinion, not anyone elses.