Solaris 9 NFS clients and Mac OS X 10.3.8 NFS Server issues
I have a situation where I'm using a Mac OS X Server machine as my file server for heterogeneous mix of clients, Solaris 9 being one of them. The NFS server portion of Mac OS X seems to have some quirks. I made the move to a Mac OS X server from a combination of Linux and Solaris because it was touted as a good multi-platform server solution, but my NFS woes are souring my opinion of it
I haven't been able to nail down the exact cause, but it seems that Sun's Gnome Destop 2.0 has problems starting up. The 'gconfd-2' process starts and never finishes what it's doing. I'm suspecting a problem with creating a lock file in the user's NFS mounted home directory. My workaround was to disable the Gnome Desktop 2.0 option, but it isn't very pleasant because many of my users liked it.
Another strange issue that plagues the Solaris 9 and Linux (Fedora 2) users is that Mozilla, which is the primary email client for my users, complains that it "Could not initialize the browser's security component." It goes on to suggest that there may be a problem with read / write access with the user's profile directory or that there's no more room. Googling didn't turn up much about this problem, but the home directory share is nowhere near full and the permissions are such that eveyone can read and write to their own profile directory just fine. I've been able to work around this problem on Linux by removing the user's 'cert8.db' and 'key3.db' files before they run Mozilla, but this technique is failing to work on the Solaris 9 clients.
All these problems seem to involve some strange file access issue, and the Linux and Solaris clients had no problems when I was using a Solaris box for home directory sharing via NFS, so it definitely seems like a problem with Mac OS X's NFS implementation.
If anyone has come across this type of issue and has some information about a fix or a better workaround, I would love to hear from you. Thanks in advance!
