NFS Services Administrator's Guide

Introduction
New Features in NFS
Chapter 1 29
• Mounting a filesystem securely
For information on how to mount a filesystem in a secure manner,
see “An Example for Securely Mounting a directory” on page 83.
For information on how to disable mount access for a single client, see
“Unmounting (Removing) a Mounted Directory” on page 84.
Starting with HP-UX 11i v3, the mount command is enhanced to provide
benefits such as performance improvement of large sequential data
transfers and local locking for faster access. The umount command allows
forcible unmounting of filesystems. These features can be accessed using
specific options of the mount command. For more information on these
options, see mount_nfs (1M), and umount (1M).
NFS clients can also unmount the directories using the umount
command. For information on unmounting a shared directory, see
“Unsharing (Removing) a Shared Directory” on page 71.
Support for WebNFS
NFS is designed as a file access protocol for LANs. WebNFS is an
extension of NFS. It enables you to access files across the Internet easily.
WebNFS is designed to handle unique problems associated with
accessing files across the Internet.
WebNFS enables filesystems at other locations on the Internet to appear
to a user as a local filesystem. WebNFS works through firewalls and
implements features such as read-ahead and write-behind, to improve
throughput and performance over the Internet.
WebNFS is supported on NFS version 2 and 3 only.
For more information on WebNFS, see “Sharing directories across a
firewall using the WebNFS Feature” on page 68.
Secure Sharing of Directories
In earlier versions of HP-UX, NFS used the AUTH_SYS authentication,
which uses UNIX style authentication, (uid/gid), to allow access to the
shared files. It is fairly simple to develop an application or server that
can masquerade as a user because the gid/uid ownership of a file can be
viewed.