Unix Tip: Using netgroups to share files

By Sandra Henry-Stocker, ITworld.com

Solaris and other SVR4 versions of Unix provide file sharing through NFS and the /etc/dfs/dfstab file. The syntax of this particular file permits you to restrict file system sharing to a limited number of hosts or to share file systems with no restrictions whatsoever. Restricting file systems to a select set of hosts is particularly important if you are permitting the client hosts to access the file systems read/write and even more important if root on the clients will have the authority of root on your NFS server.

You can specify the hosts that are permitted to mount file systems by stringing them together in a colon-separated format with the share command, such as this command which can be issued on the command line or included in the dfstab file for a more or less permanent setup:

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