Bizarre ZMAIL/UNIX interaction problem

[barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)]

    Date: Mon, 10 Sep 90  09:56:18 EDT
    From: delaney@xn.ll.mit.edu (John R. Delaney)

    I have no
    problem reading my mail from any of the 3600s or from the MacIvory,
    although the latter prompts me for my SUN password 3 time while the former
    does so only once. 

What version of NFS Client are you running?  The version I have
(415.0) *never* asks for passwords.

    But then there is USER-C. He is assigned to HOST-V; his login file is
    HOST-V:/home/host-v/user-c/.login and his mail file is
    HOST-V:/home/host-v/user-c/RMAIL. But if he uses that in his ZMAIL-INIT
    file, HOST-V rejects his attempts to login in from ZMAIL after prompting
    for his password. If he uses HOST-A:/home/host-v/user-c/RMAIL instead in
    his ZMAIL-INIT file, he has no problem. To make things more peculiar, if he
    use the terminal emulator to connect to HOST-V, it accepts his login and
    password fine. If he does EXECUTE COMMAND HOST-V PWD in the LISP Listener,
    he get prompted for his password, but it is again accepted and prints the
    right UNIX directory.

Check the /etc/exports file on HOST-V, and make sure it allows mounts
from the MacIvory.

    Further information: USER-C is the primary MacIvory user. I haven't tried
    him yet on one of the 3600s; he is brand-new and has enough trouble with
    the MacIvory. But I can do that if necessary to improve the diagnosis.

    Other users with their .login and RMAIL files on HOST-V have no problems
    with ZMAIL. For that matter, if I supply my SUN user name and then password
    when USER-C is prompted for passwords, HOST-V also works OK.

Are you doing this on the MacIvory?  The Sun NFS server doesn't do any
user authentication at mount time, although it does check that the user
has appropriate access to the files he tries to access.  The only
authentication done at mount time is host authentication, using the
access lists in the /etc/exports file.

Then again, since you're being asked for passwords, it's not clear that
you're actually using NFS to access your Sun files (unless you've got an
early copy of 8.1 NFS, which I think someone said would provide password
checking).

                                                barmar