[87] in DCNS Development
Common 7.3 "bug"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Basch)
Mon Aug 5 02:17:27 1991
Date: Mon, 5 Aug 91 02:16:06 -0400
To: "Testers" <devnull@odie.mit.edu>
From: Richard Basch <basch@MIT.EDU>
There seems to be one prevalent bug report that is not a release bug.
On the newer systems (Ultrix 4.2, AIX, and A/UX), it is likely that you
will be unable to attach some filesystems from some servers. The error
that you may receive is:
RPC: Authentication error; Invalid client credential
(or something similar, depending on the platform).
This is an indication that the NFS server that you are talking to is not
conforming to the NFS standards. A bug was found in our NFS
implementation that prevented various NFS clients from talking to our
servers.
The problem only occurs if you are in more than 8 groups and are talking
to a private Athena NFS server that is running 7.2R or earlier (the main
Athena user NFS file servers have already been patched). According to
RFC 1057, the NFS/RPC protocol allows for 16 groups to be sent in the
various NFS/RPC requests, but our servers were only accepting up to 8
groups.
Unfortunately, because it is not desirable to alter vendor kernels, and
in some cases not possible, all that can be done is to urge the private
server maintainers to update their machines as soon as possible.
Currently, the most common occurrence of this problem has been with the
"discuss" fileset on charon. Other reports have been made about other
servers, such as pit-manager.
-R
