NFSv4 on Solaris and Netapp

Hit a peculiar problem today with a new Solaris 10 T2000 and our NetApp FAS3020.  While the right users had the right access to the volumes mounted from the NetApp, directory listings showed the directories and files owned by “nobody” with the group “nobody”.

With older version of NFS, this usually meant that the filesystem was not exported with read/write access to the host, but, since this had already been done quite some time ago, it looked like the problem was related to NFSv4.   Some quick investigation showed this to be the case.

The resolution was two fold:

1.  On the Netapp, I make sure that “nfs.v4.id.domain” was set to the domain name.  It defaults to nothing “”.
2. Again, on the Netapp, since we are not using a centralized location for accounts (we have < 12 accounts across all of the systems), I had to populate /etc/passwd with all of the accounts on the rest of the systems and /etc/group with all of the groups defined on the rest of the systems.

That brought the behavior back to what was expected.