I work for a computer science department at a university. We're a
mostly Mac shop with two xserves. My boss likes to scale out when
there is no need. As such, he's asked me to setup a G4 xserve as an
apache httpd + tomcat server, MySQL, and ssh server. In addition,
he wants us to use a G5 xserve with an attached xserve raid as a
file server and open directory master. We plan to create student
accounts on this system and allow students and professors to create
websites.
In addition, Mac and Windows clients will be accessing the G5 for
files and in the case of the Macs for authentication.
OK, nothing strange or unnecessarily scaled out so far...
The problem we're having is mounting the file system on the xserve
raid for use on the G4.
Well, you can't.
The XServe RAID is DAS so it's only ever directly connected to any
one machine. That's what DAS means.
My idea was to use the userdir feature in apache and simply mount
the home directories stored on the xserve raid using NFS.
Oh that's a wonderfully BAD idea. NFS (No Freaking Security) is a
terrible way of sharing files. Use AFP or SMB instead.
Not only does NFS not offer security at all, but it also doesn't
permit you to use ACLs, which you'll probably want if you're doing
file sharing.
I can mount the volume manually without a problem, but any
attempts to automate it have failed.
Well what have you tried?
Currently, user home directories are mapped to a share called home
on the xserve g5 with a path like afp://servername/home and then the
local location is /Network/Servers in workgroup manager as
suggested in examples. I realize that anything mounted in
/Network/Servers is a dynamic mount, but obviously that is a very
bad idea with a webserver. Ideally we'd like apache and ssh to work
for students. We'd rather have them ssh into the webserver then the
open directory master.
But apache isn't a "user" in this sense so this sort of action is nonsensical.
Instead mount the device at startup.
So far I've tried adding an entry to NetInfo Manager, /etc/rc.local
(to manually call mount_nfs) ,
YOU NEVER MUNGE rc.* -- EVER!! You must have come from a BSD world ;)
Instead add an entry to fstab, if you really, really want NFS.
and even tried a startup item based on an example for mounting a
SAN file system in apple's KB. (suggested by a friend) I changed
it to use NFS obviously.
I'm sorry I can't seem to lean over your shoulder to see how you did
this. Perhaps you might share with use what you tried?
All three failed without any error in the logs. I was told by an
apple employee that fstab is not read for NFS entries so I didn't
bother to try that.
From documentation I've seen, its ideal for the clients to
dynamically mount with AFP.
Except the user www won't because it's not a "client user" per se.
Hence this is completely not what you want to be doing since user
"www" never "logs in" in this sense.
I think changing the clients to statically mount with NFS might
work, but I'm not fond of the idea.
I'd appreciate any suggestions.
Again, consider mounting the device using AFP or SMB at startup:
mkdir /Volumes/sharename
mount -t afp afp://username:email@hidden/sharename /Volumes/sharename
However you could do better to use XSan here, that way you can have a
single common, clustered filesystem -- since your boss likes
overkill. ;)
--
-dhan
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Shoop AIM: iWiring
Systems & Networks Architect http://www.ustsvs.com/
email@hidden http://www.iwiring.net/
1-714-363-1174
"The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right
questions." -- Claude Levi-Strauss
iWiring provides systems and networks support for Mac OS X, unix, and
Open Source application technologies at affordable rates.
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