System Administration Guide, Volume 3

Administering the Secure NFS System

To use the Secure NFS system, all the computers you are responsible for must have a domain name. A domain is an administrative entity, typically consisting of several computers, that is part of a larger network. If you are running NIS+, you should also establish the NIS+ name service for the domain. See Solaris Naming Setup and Configuration Guide.

You can configure the Secure NFS environment to use either Diffie-Hellman.. "Managing System Security (Overview)" in System Administration Guide, Volume 2 discusses this authentication service.

How to Set Up a Secure NFS Environment With DH Authentication

Assign your domain a domain name, and make the domain name known to each computer in the domain.

See the Solaris Naming Administration Guide if you are using NIS+ as your name service.

Establish public keys and secret keys for your clients' users using the newkey or nisaddcred command, and have each user establish his or her own secure RPC password using the chkey command.

Note -
For information about these commands, see the newkey(1M), the nisaddcred(1M), and the chkey(1) man pages.

When public and secret keys have been generated, the public and encrypted secret keys are stored in the publickey database.

Verify that the name service is responding. If you are running NIS+, type the following:

# nisping -u
Last updates for directory eng.acme.com. :
Master server is eng-master.acme.com.
        Last update occurred at Mon Jun  5 11:16:10 1995

Replica server is eng1-replica-replica-58.acme.com.
        Last Update seen was Mon Jun  5 11:16:10 1995

If you are running NIS, verify that the ypbind daemon is running.

Verify that the keyserv daemon (the key server) is running.

Type the following command.

# ps -ef | grep keyserv
root    100     1  16    Apr 11 ?      0:00 /usr/sbin/keyserv
root	  2215  2211   5  09:57:28 pts/0  0:00 grep keyserv

If the daemon isn't running, start the key server by typing the following:

# /usr/sbin/keyserv

Decrypt and store the secret key.

Usually, the login password is identical to the network password. In this case, keylogin is not required. If the passwords are different, the users have to log in, and then do a keylogin. You still need to use the keylogin -r command as root to store the decrypted secret key in /etc/.rootkey.

Note -
You only need to run keylogin -r if the root secret key changes or /etc/.rootkey is lost.

Update mount options for the file system.

Edit the /etc/dfs/dfstab file and add the sec=dh option to the appropriate entries (for Diffie-Hellman authentication).
share -F nfs -o sec=dh /export/home

Update the automounter maps for the file system.

Edit the auto_master data to include sec=dh as a mount option in the appropriate entries (for Diffie-Hellman authentication):
/home auto_home -nosuid,sec=dh
Note -
With 2.5 and earlier Solaris releases, if a client does not mount as secure a file system that is shared as secure, users have access as user nobody, rather than as themselves. With Version 2 on later releases, the NFS server refuses access if the security modes do not match, unless -sec=none is included on the share command line. With version 3, the mode is inherited from the NFS server, so clients do not need to specify sec=krb4 or sec=dh. The users have access to the files as themselves.

When you reinstall, move, or upgrade a computer, remember to save /etc/.rootkey if you do not establish new keys or change them for root. If you do delete /etc/.rootkey, you can always type:
# keylogin -r