The pynfs handling of authentication is currently rather hairy. This is in part due to the fact that all the main scripts (nfs4client.py, nfs4st.py, and test_tree_net.py) usually need to run as root so that they can bind to a privileged port in order to be trusted by the server.
We currently provide two mostly-consistent ways to specify the UID and GID to use in the AUTH_SYS credentials of the RPC layer. All scripts should take a --uid= and --gid= command line option. If this is not specified, the scripts will attempt to poll the environment variables PYNFS_UID and PYNFS_GID and use those. If neither of these two are specified, UID and GID will both be 0.
Galen Elias (gme@citi.umich.edu)
May 13, 2003