[CentOS] Permission "nfsnobody" and mounting an nfs share in a datacenter

Sat Oct 27 17:39:47 UTC 2012
Gordon Messmer <yinyang at eburg.com>

On 10/22/2012 11:03 PM, Jobst Schmalenbach wrote:
> I already asked the data center whether they can do the squash ...
> they can't. They have a deal with a supplier providing the infrastructure
> for the NFS system.

Create a sparse file on NFS and mount it as a loopback filesystem. 
Provided that the NFS isn't backed by NTFS, this should work just fine.
Some output trimmed:

[root at vagabond home]# dd if=/dev/zero of=newfs bs=1 count=1

[root at vagabond home]# ls -l newfs
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 1000000000001 Oct 27 10:36 newfs

[root at vagabond home]# mkfs -t ext4 newfs
mke2fs 1.42.3 (14-May-2012)
newfs is not a block special device.
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y

[root at vagabond home]# mount newfs  /mnt/

[root at vagabond home]# df
Filesystem                      1K-blocks     Used Available Use% 
/dev/loop0                      961238684   204436 912206124   1% /mnt