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SULinux Faq-O-Matic : General Information : Why is NFS/NIS disabled? NFS and other RPC based programs are a big security risk for several reasons. First, they have a less than admirable record. Most Linux compromises on campus come from users who have enabled NFS and other RPC services and forgot to patch them. Second, NFS and other RPC services have horrendous logging, which makes it difficult to track what is going on. Third, NFS has traditionally been hard to set up properly, though Linux is making strong in-roads in this department. Last, NFS just plain isn't needed by most people. You need not run the service if you only want to mount other hosts filesystems. You only need to run NFS if you absolutely must export one of your filesystems. Redhat (not us) by default disables NFS and their Medium or High Level firewall settings disable all RPC services, including NFS and NIS [Append to This Answer] Previous: What are the various authentication methods? Next: Why is autofs disabled? This document is: http://sulinux.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/fom?file=16 [Search] [Appearance] This is a Faq-O-Matic 2.717.

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