The /etc/passwd file must contain a login account for "nobody".
Enter the line: grep nobody /etc/passwd
The response should be:
nobody:*:65534:65534::/:
If this line does not appear, modify the /etc/passwd file to include it. This account is used by NFS to disallow root access via NFS.
For system security reasons, the super-user does not have access permissions on remote file systems. This is implemented by mapping UID 0 ("root") to UID 65534 (unsigned representation of -2 in 2's complement notation) on all NFS client systems. The super-user on an NFS client has the same permissions as a user with the UID -2.
The login account "nobody" has the UID 65534 (-2).
Article Change History:
06 Sep 1994 - Reviewed.
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