I don't know if this had been around or not, but my newly installed Slackware 3.0.0 linux shows this behaviour: ccarik /home/arikb>su - Password: ccarik /root# cat /etc/exports # See exports(5) for a description. # This file contains a list of all directories exported to other computers. # It is used by rpc.nfsd and rpc.mountd. /home/arikb ccarik(ro,root_squash) ccarik /root# rpc.mountd ; rpc.nfsd ccarik /root# mount ccarik:/home/arikb /mnt ccarik /root# cd /mnt ccarik /mnt# ls -al xxx -rwxrwxrwx 1 arikb users 29 Apr 7 15:27 xxx* ccarik /mnt# cat > yyy yyy: Read-only file system. ccarik /mnt# cat .rhosts blabla blablabla2 blablabla3 ccarik /mnt# cat >> xxx blablabla4 ccarik /mnt# cat xxx blabla blablabla2 blablabla3 blablabla4 ccarik /mnt# This means also .rhosts exploits, small addition to system scripts, etc. etc., while the sysadmin believes his system is mounted only "read-only"... Moving over to nfs-server-2.2beta4 solved this one.