NFS export directory not filesystem?

[David Elliott]

In article <1990Feb22.152003.22717 at comm.WANG.COM> lws at comm.WANG.COM (Lyle Seaman) writes:
>I have an Sun running SunOS 3.4  and  several SCO Unix V/386 boxes.
>I have no problem exporting filesystems from any of these machines and
>mounting them on any other machine, but if I try to export only a 
>subirectory (a child of a filesystem root) I have no success.  

This appears to be a general NFS version 3 problem.  The behavior is
similar on Sony NEWS/OS, which uses this version of NFS.  Given the
fact that SunOS 3.4 probably came out as NFS version 4 was being
finished up, it's unlikely that there's a version 3 fix for it.  (Note
that I'm speculating on the timing -- I wasn't there.)

The only thing I can think of (besides upgrading your system) to help
would be to set the permissions on the upper levels of the filesystem
so that it isn't useable from an NFS mount.  This will have
ramifications on your local machine.

>Sun support wasn't much help - they said it "works on a 4.0 machine
>configured as a server".

What do you expect?  SunOS 4.* has been out for over a year now.  My
experience shows that it isn't reasonable for a company to support that
many versions of an OS (you're asking them to support 2 major and 4
minor versions from 3.4->4.0.3).

As far as I'm concerned, part of the support "understanding" (if not
the actual agreement) is that the customer agrees to upgrade to the
latest version for continued support, and the vendor agrees to keep the
amount of work required to upgrade to a minimum.

One question:  Do you believe that the support folks even tried to
research the problem, looking it up in back reports or talking to
technical folks?  Sun support has a very good reputation (I guess
with that many DOA units, you have to have good support).

-- 
David Elliott
dce at smsc.sony.com | ...!{uunet,mips}!sonyusa!dce
(408)944-4073
"...it becomes natural, like a third sense." -- Homer Simpson