Reset UNIX permissions on an NFS vol

[inner bear]

Our Linux admins have somehow managed to corrupt/destroy permissions in a subdirectory of an NFS export I made for them a while back.

Is there a way to reset UNIX permissions for a volume administratively from the filer?

I found the volume modify -unix-permissions command but wasn't sure if that just set the default for new files, or if that would even affect existing directories in that volume.

We have backups of course, and they could always copy out the directory and create a new one, but both of those will require a umount/remount on their end which will require downtime on a very critical system.

Any thoughts?

[thin pollen]

[I] wasn't sure if that just set the default for new files, or if that would even affect existing directories in that volume.
neither. It sets the permissions on the root directory of that volume, i.e. what you see on the client on the mount path after mounting the directory

The easiest way to reset permissions is to mount through a -superuser sys policy (what Linux calls "no root squashing") and just reset the permissions as root.

This is infinitely easier on NFS than it is on CIFS shares so you're basically in luck 🙂

[inner bear]

The admins led me to believe they are not able to touch this directory anymore, even as root. I will pass that along and hopefully that sparks something for them. Thank you for the reply!

[thin pollen]

yeah then the export policy on the NetApp is probably inhibiting root access... which is something you usually want, but not in such cases ... so make an export policy rule so that, e.g. for a single client IP, root is not squashed and then you can set the permissions from that client

[inner bear]

In System Manager I have "Allow Superuser Access" checked already in the export policy rule for this client. I'm assuming that is equivalent to not squashing root?

[thin pollen]

yeah, should be. I'm not very familiar with System Manager to be honest, but that should do the trick, yes