NCR NFS endianism

[Bill Kennedy]

I am having some problems between Interactive (Lachman) 80386 NFS
and NCR (Wollongong) NFS on a Tower 32/400.  Sea Change is helping
me track it down and they have been able to duplicate the symptom.
It appears to be something as fundamental as network byte order but
that's sooo fundamental that I would prefer to think it's something
else.

The little endian is ssbn, Interactive '386 UNIX 2.2 (Vr3.2) and the
big endian is wrangler, NCR Vr3.1.  If ssbn mounts one of wranglers
exports everything is hunky dory.  If wrangler mounts one of ssbns
exports, however, I run into permission/UID problems for any write
operation other than a create.  Here's an example (please ignore the
naming details):

ssbn exports its root directory without any restrictions.
wrangler mounts ssbn:/weather on its /wx directory.
both ssbn:/weather and wrangler:/wx are 777 permissions, owned by user
     125 and group 100, ls -al looks just fine on both machines.
as user 125 (who is in group 100) vi a new file and it gets created OK
     with appropriate UID and GID, ls -l looks just fine.
now touch the file and it fails and ls shows the owner and group 65535.

This does not happen between a Tower and a Sun workstation but Sea
Change can make it happen between a Tower and a '486 little endian.
Is anyone running NCR NFS between a Tower and something like a VAX?
If so, can you write to a VAX directory exported to and mounted on
the Tower?

Sea Change is speculating that what's happening is that someone isn't
getting network byte order correct when the UID/GID is passed back and
forth so it's being changed to nobody.  Since everything is OK between
a Tower and a Sun and everything is OK between two 386en, it sure sounds
like Sea Change is correct.  On the other hand it would seem that this
would have been pretty thoroughly tested.  By that I mean that surely
Interactive tested between a '386 and a Sun and surely NCR tested between
a Tower and a VAX (or a 3xxx).  I'm also very dubious that I'm the first
poor sod to have encountered this if it's really a bug.  Any ideas?
-- 
Bill Kennedy  uucp      {att,cs.utexas.edu,pyramid!daver}!ssbn.wlk.com!bill
              internet    bill at ssbn.WLK.COM   or ssbn!bill at attmail.COM