NFS Services Administrator's Guide

Introduction
New Features in NFS
Chapter 1 23
For information on how to secure your systems, see “Secure Sharing
of Directories” on page 56.
• ACLs
An Access Control List (ACL) provides stronger file security, by
enabling the owner of a file to define file permissions for the file
owner, the group, and other specific users and groups. ACL support is
built into the protocol. ACLs can be managed from an NFS client
using either the setacl or the getacl command.
For more information on ACLs, see acl (1M), getacl (1M), and
setacl (1M).
NOTE In NFSv2 and NFSv3, ACLs are manipulated using NFSACL
protocol. If systems in your environment do not support the NFSACL
protocol, then ACLs cannot be manipulated using this feature.
• File Handle Types
File handles are created on the server and contain information that
uniquely identify files and directories. Following are the different file
handle types:
— ROOT
The ROOT file handle represents the conceptual root of the file
system namespace on an NFS server. The NFS client starts with
the ROOT file handle by using the PUTROOTFH operation. This
operation instructs the server to set the current file handle to the
root of the server file tree. If you use the PUTROOTFH
operation, the client can traverse the entire file tree using the
LOOKUP operation.
— Persistent
The persistent file handle is an assigned fixed value for the
lifetime of the filesystem object that it refers to. When the server
creates the file handle for a filesystem object, the server must
accept the same file handle for the lifetime of the object. The
persistent file handle persists across server reboots and
filesystem migrations.