11.4. NFS File Server

NFS (Network File System) is a protocol allowing remote access to a filesystem through the network. All Unix systems can work with this protocol; when Windows systems are involved, Samba must be used instead.

NFS is a very useful tool, but its shortcomings must be kept in mind especially where security matters are concerned: all data goes over the network in the clear (a sniffer can intercept it); the server enforces access restrictions based on the client's IP address (which can be spoofed); and finally, when a client machine is granted access to a misconfigured NFS share, the client's root user can access all the files on the share (even those belonging to other users) since the server trusts the username it receives from the client (this is a historical limitation of the protocol).

11.4.1. Securing NFS

Since NFS trusts the information it receives from the network, it is vital to ensure that only the machines allowed to use it can connect to the various required RPC servers. The firewall must also block IP spoofing so as to prevent an outside machine from acting as an inside one, and access to the appropriate ports must be restricted to the machines meant to access the NFS shares.

Other RPC services may be required for NFS to work optimally, including rpc.mountd, rpc.statd and lockd. However, these services use a random port (assigned by the portmapper) by default, which makes it difficult to filter traffic targeting these services. The Falcot Corp administrators found a work-around for this problem, described below.

The first two services mentioned above are implemented by user-space programs, started respectively by /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server and /etc/init.d/nfs-common. They provide configuration options to force ports; the relevant files to modify to always use these options are /etc/default/nfs-kernel-server and /etc/default/nfs-common.

Example 11.23. The /etc/default/nfs-kernel-server file

# Number of servers to start up
RPCNFSDCOUNT=8

# Options for rpc.mountd
RPCMOUNTDOPTS="-p 2048"

Example 11.24. The /etc/default/nfs-common file

# Options for rpc.statd.
#   Should rpc.statd listen on a specific port?
#   If so, set this variable to a statd argument like: "--port 1000".
STATDOPTS="-p 2046 -o 2047"

# Are you _sure_ that your kernel does or does not need a lockd daemon?
# If so, set this variable to either "yes" or "no".
NEED_LOCKD=

Once these changes are made and the services are restarted, rpc.mountd uses port 2048; rpc.statd listens on port 2046 and uses port 2047 for outgoing connections.

The lockd service is handled by a kernel thread (lightweight process); this feature is built as a module on Debian kernels. The module has two options allowing to always choose the same port, nlm_udpport and nlm_tcpport. In order for these options to be systematically used, there needs to be a /etc/modprobe.d/lockd file such as the following:

Example 11.25. The /etc/modprobe.d/lockd file

options lockd nlm_udpport=2045 nlm_tcpport=2045

Once these parameters are set, it becomes easier to control access to the NFS service from the firewall in a fine-grained way by filtering access to ports 111 and 2045 through 2049 (both UDP and TCP).

11.4.2. NFS Server

The NFS server is part of the Linux kernel; in kernels provided by Debian it is built as a kernel module. If the NFS server is to be run automatically on boot, the nfs-kernel-server package should be installed; it contains the relevant start-up scripts.

The NFS server configuration file, /etc/exports, lists the directories that are made available over the network (exported). For each NFS share, only the given list of machines is granted access. More fine-grained access control can be obtained with a few options. The syntax for this file is quite simple:

/directory/to/share machine1(option1,option2,...) machine2(...) ...

Each machine can be identified either by its DNS name or its IP address. Whole sets of machines can also be specified using either a syntax such as *.falcot.com or an IP address range such as 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0 or 192.168.0.0/24.

Directories are made available as read-only by default (or with the ro option). The rw option allows read-write access. NFS clients typically connect from a port restricted to root (in other words, below 1024); this restriction can be lifted by the insecure option (the secure option is implicit, but it can be made explicit if needed for clarity).

By default, the server only answers an NFS query when the current disk operation is complete (sync option); this can be disabled with the async option. Asynchronous writes increase performance a bit, but they decrease reliability since there's a data loss risk in case of the server crashing between the acknowledgment of the write and the actual write on disk. Since the default value changed recently (as compared to the historical value of NFS), an explicit setting is recommended.

In order to not give root access to the filesystem to any NFS client, all queries appearing to come from a root user are considered by the server as coming from the anonymous user. This behavior corresponds to the root_squash option, and is enabled by default. The no_root_squash option, which disables this behavior, is risky and should only be used in controlled environments. The anonuid=uid and anongid=gid options allow specifying another fake user to be used instead of anonymous.

Other options are available; they are documented in the exports(5) manual page.

CAUTION First installation

The /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server boot script only starts the server if the /etc/exports lists one or more valid NFS shares. On initial configuration, once this file has been edited to contain valid entries, the NFS server must therefore be started with the following command:

# /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server start

11.4.3. NFS Client

As with other filesystems, integrating an NFS share into the system hierarchy requires mounting. Since this filesystem has its peculiarities, a few adjustments were required in the syntaxes of the mount command and the /etc/fstab file.

Example 11.26. Manually mounting with the mount command

# mount -t nfs -o rw,nosuid arrakis.interne.falcot.com:/srv/shared /shared

Example 11.27. NFS entry in the /etc/fstab file

arrakis.interne.falcot.com:/srv/shared /shared nfs rw,nosuid 0 0

The entry described above mounts, at system startup, the /srv/shared/ NFS directory from the arrakis server into the local /shared/ directory. Read-write access is requested (hence the rw parameter). The nosuid option is a protection measure that wipes any setuid or setgit bit from programs stored on the share. If the NFS share is only meant to store documents, another recommended option is noexec, which prevents executing programs stored on the share.

The nfs(5) manual page describes all the options in some detail.