Problem with NFS and ACLs in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

[James Cooley]

We just upgraded two of our servers from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 to 
Red Hat Enterprise 4.  Red Hat had patched the kernel for RHEL 3 to 
provide support for ACLs over NFS, and previously, this worked fine 
between the two servers.

We did clean installs when we went to RHEL 4, but this no longer works.  
We are using NFSv3 between the two systems because we do not yet have 
our kerberos infrastructure setup yet for using NFSv4.

Both systems have all of the ACL packages installed, and ACL support is 
enabled for the filesystem on the NFS server.


We are exporting the filesystem in /etc/exports with a line similar to 
the following:

/my newserver.test.fit.edu(rw,sync,no_root_squash)



The filesystem on the NFS server with the following fstab line:

/dev/mapper/msa20-my   /my    ext3 defaults,acl,usrquota 0 0




The filesystem is mounted on the client using the following fstab line:

newserver.test.fit.edu:/my /my nfs 
timeo=14,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,intr,hard,nfsvers=3,tcp 0 0



Doing an strace on a 'getfacl test' on the filesystem has the following 
results for the getxattr call, which illustrates our problem:


On the server, we get:

getxattr("/my/test", "system.posix_acl_access", 
"\x02\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x06\x00\xff\xff\xff\xff\x04\x00\x04\x00\xff\xff\xff\xff\x08\x00\x04\x000\x00\x00\x00\x10\x00\x04\x00\xff\xff\xff\xff 
\x00\x04\x00\xff\xff\xff\xff", 132) = 44


On the client we get:


getxattr("test", "system.posix_acl_access", 0x7fbffff390, 132) = -1 
EOPNOTSUPP (Operation not supported)


The Red Hat Administrators Guide at: 
https://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/sysadmin-guide/s1-nfs-mount.html  
seems to indicate that this should still work.

Has anyone else run into this problem or know of a solution?


Thanks,

-- 
--
James Cooley
Sr. Systems Analyst
Information Technology
Florida Tech
321-674-7999
jcooley at it.fit.edu