Secure NFSv4 mounts and daemons

[Ralph Zack <ralphz@zoho.com>]

Hi all,

I have a number of NFSv4 shares which should only be accessible after
successful authentication, for which reason they are exported with
sec=krb5p. However, this method requires the user to obtain a kerberos
ticket to access files on the share, which is fine for regular users but
causes issues for daemons which are not kerberos-aware.

What is the common way to handle this problem? It can hardly be the only
solution to patch each service to obtain a ticket at startup. Please
correct me if I'm wrong, but I could not find any mechanism besides
kerberos that provides encryption and authentication for NFS shares. I'd
be fine with authentication on a host level, I mainly want to ensure
that only trusted machines can accesses these shares and that all
traffic is encrypted. Without the overhead of establishing a VPN
connection between client and server, in case anyone was going to
suggest that ;)

Cheers,

Ralph