From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) Description of problem: If the redhat-config-nfs utility is installed on a machine and the NFS server is setup (either with the utility or by directly editing the /etc/exports file), clients cannot mount the exported root drive. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Set up a RedHat 8.0 system with the redhat-config-nfs utility. 2. Export the root drive to all machine on the network, either using the GUI utility or by editing /etc/exports. My resulting exports line was: / *(rw) 3. Restart the NFS server 4. Attempt to mount the exported root volume on another RedHat 8 machine. The server ALWAYS returns "permission denied", regardless of settings in /etc/exports or in the GUI utility. 5. Now, uninstall redhat-config-nfs using redhat-config-packages. 6. Write a new /etc/exports by hand, and restart the NFS service. 7. The other RedHat 8 machine can now mount the volume. Additional info: It seems that some security "feature" has been somehow built into this redhat- config-nfs utility which will not allow clients to mount an exported root partition. Some may argue that "you shouldn't export your root partition" etc etc. Our machine is behind a firewall on a private network, so the security risk is minimal. If the GUI is going to enforce such a policy, it should tell the user so he (ie - me) doesn't spend a whole day trying to find this. Note that this only occurs for an export of "/" (exporting /users, for example, works fine). This also only occurs if the machine trying to mount the share is a RedHat 8 machine. A RedHat 7.3 machine mounted the volume fine, even with redhat-config-nfs installed.
No, it wasn't any kind of security "feature". It was just a plain old bug. ;) I believe that this is fixed with redhat-config-nfs-1.0.2-2 in Rawhide. QA, please verify. Thanks for your report.