Suppose we have two client machines, slave1 and slave2, that have IP addresses 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.2, respectively. We wish to share our software binaries and home directories with these machines. A typical setup for
/etc/exports might look like this:/usr/local 192.168.0.1(ro) 192.168.0.2(ro) /home 192.168.0.1(rw) 192.168.0.2(rw)
Here we are sharing /usr/local read-only to slave1 and slave2, because it probably contains our software and there may not be benefits to allowing slave1 and slave2 to write to it that outweigh security concerns. On the other hand, home directories need to be exported read-write if users are to save their work on them.
If you have a large installation, you may find that you have a bunch of computers all on the same local network that require access to your server. There are a few ways of simplifying references to large numbers of machines. First, you can give access to a range of machines at once by specifying a network and a netmask. For example, if you wanted to allow access to all the machines with IP addresses between 192.168.0.0 and 192.168.0.255 then you could have the entries:
/usr/local 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0(ro) /home 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0(rw)
/etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny
These two files specify which computers on the network can use services on your machine. Each line of the file contains a single entry listing a service and a set of machines. When the server gets a request from a machine, it does the following:- It first checks
hosts.allow to see if the machine matches a rule listed here. If it does, then the machine is allowed access. - If the machine does not match an entry in
hosts.allow the server then checks hosts.deny to see if the client matches a rule listed there. If it does then the machine is denied access. - If the client matches no listings in either file, then it is allowed access.
In addition to controlling access to services handled by inetd (such as telnet and FTP), this file can also control access to NFS by restricting connections to the daemons that provide NFS services. Restrictions are done on a per-service basis.
