royans

A lot of organizations do not realise the danger of NFS untill they have been intruded by hostile crackers. This article would give a short description of most NFS realted problems and means to avoid it. Since I mostly use solaris, I'll try to stick to Solaris examples in this paper. Problems: Un-authenticated NFS mounts. Many sys-admins including me, have setup uncontrolled NFS shares on solaris boxes. There might be many excuses for this. My popular excuse is that I was just testing it, or that I was asked to do that by someone else. No matter what the excuse is, its tough to recover from a hostile attack morally if its ever misused. As a matter of policy shares should have restricted hosts, especially if it has read-write enabled. No NFS mounts should be allowed from hosts which are accessable from the Internet, and one should avoid critical write enabled NFS mounts in a non-secure zone. Problems: home directories Its is a popular to use NFS for home directories, especially for

With the expansion of internet, the userbase of most sites are growing exponentially. However the speed of the servers themselves are not growing fast enough. It is hence logical to conclude that these services have to be setup on multiple servers. Depending on what kind of service you are providing this could be a trivial task. Problem 1 However, some applications are very touchy about which server the client connects to after the first hit. It is possible that the service itself is not scalable enough to allow user to switch between the two servers without interrupting the service. This requires some sort of session management to allow users to stick to one server after they log in. Solution 1 There are three primary ways of getting this done. The first and foremost way is to resolve this issue is to setup loadbalancer to loadbalance using the Source-IP of the client. This will make sure that the client browser always goes to the same server for that particular session. This solution