I have serveral Ubuntu server running in virtual machines on my host. Everything works fine but there is a problem. I use NFS to share a common directory between the VMs. And as the machines user IDs are different so even when user and password are the same, they cannot write data or use data thats from another VM. Changing user IDs did not work properly, I rolled that back.
So, someone mentioned Kerberos to manage users. This seems a bit too much effort. Is there a better, lightweight solution? Or even another way to share a common disk space? How is this done usually?
This is how NFS works. Making sure that usernames and userids match on all of your servers will fix this and is by far the simplest solution. If it didn’t work, you probably just made a typo somewhere.
Other options.
Use an LDAP serer (I like LLDAP) to provide a single user database for all your servers. This has lots of advantages (can provision users and change passwords for all servers in a single place). But it is fixing your problem in the same way as above (making usernames and user ids match on all of your servers).
Use Samba/CIFS instead of NFS. Because you authenticate with a user/pass all actions happen as the user you authenticate and so local user permissions don’t matter.