share nfs zfs solaris

In Solaris 11.1 Oracle decided to change the way that they stored filesystem share information.  I personally loved the change, but that was without understanding what the change really was.  For more information on how to enable NFS exports see my previous article here.

Setup Our Environment

Everything we are doing will be on some test file systems, with no data.  So lets put everything in place.

Now lets create our child filesystem, and export it the same way.

Now this will simulate a situation that I was in.  I had originally exported everything at a higher level (fs1) and then as the dataset grew it became necessary to export it at the child level (sub1) in order to have more granular control.  So now we have two exports, and only need sub1.

Disable Unused NFS Export

Since fs1 is no longer needed lets disable its export.

Lets take a look at fs1 to see if our configuration is still active.

OK it is empty.  But since I don’t need this any more I want to make sure that there are no remaining artifacts.  So lets re-enable it and confirm that the configuration is gone.

OK, so our configuration is still there, but it is disabled by share.nfs=off.  It must be kept elsewhere in the file system.

FYI, this is included in the ZFS metadata, so if you were to export you zpool and take it to another system, it would come over to the other system.

Explore ZFS Properties

Lets disable fs1 and start poking around.

First thing to do is a get all.  This will list all of the properties of the filesystem.  I trimmed it back to only display the one that I found interesting.

OK so lets look a little bit closer at this share.* property.

So share.* is not a valid property, it means that there are sub-properties, apparently share.all will display the sub-properties.

Oh boy, now we are getting somewhere, here is our share.nfs, and we can also see that share.nfs has sub-properties as well.  Also notice that smb is also stored here in the same fashion.

Under share.nfs.all we have a lot of NFS parameters, the most important at this point is share.nfs.sec.all, so lets look there.

We are getting warmer.  Now we have the share.nfs.sec.sys.all to take a look at.

OK well we have run out of levels to go deeper, but I still don’t see anything.  Perhaps if we call the property by name?

So that is empty as well.  Perhaps that has something to do with the export being disabled?  Lets confirm our export is disabled.

Doesn’t get any more disabled than that. Well lets check the sub1 file system.

So we can see that it is enabled, lets check the share property to see what our whole string is.

Based on that string we should have share.nfs.sec.sys.rw = 10.0.0.15.

OK well that was unexpected.  Property is empty on the enabled export file system as well.  We must be missing something.

Back to the Drawing Board

Out of pure desperation and a fair bit of luck.  I was attempting to lookup the help command on zfs get, and accidentally typed list instead.  But look at what I found.

There is a share file system type.  Certainly that must have something to do with everything I am seeing?

Clearly we are onto something here.  We have a share file system type for both our enabled and our disabled NFS export.  Lets see what kind of properties these new file system types have.

ZFS File System Share Type

Well there is a share.* so that must be what we are looking for.  Lets try our previous command against this new file system and take a look at what we get.

Well there is that elusive read write statement.

Updating NFS Security Statements

Now lets see what happens when we change it.

Here we have added a second IP address to be allowed to read and write, on our disabled NFS export.

The property is successfully updated on the share file system type.  Lets see if it also enabled the NFS export.

Still disabled, that is perfect.  Now lets see what happens on an enabled NFS export.

Now we have added 2 new IPs to have read only access to this export.  Lets check its effect.

The properties were successfully updated.  Lets check the file system to see if the share properties were brought over.

That looks perfect, and lets ask NFS what it knows.

Wonderful!  That is exactly what we wanted.  Now one final thing.

Removing NFS Export Configuration Permanently

Now since there is this whole different type of file system to store the share configuration, removing it becomes incredibly easy.

That pretty much wraps up everything.