Root Squash on Posit Workbench

When deploying high-availability (or load balancing) on Workbench, you may notice that the following article mentions the requirement of root_squash to obtain the full functionality of Workbench:

https://support.posit.co/hc/en-us/articles/360060548093

What is root_squash?

This is a security measure that is used as a mounting argument when mounting NFS shares. When used, it will allow the root user on the client to both access and create files on the NFS server as root.

Using root_squash with Posit Workbench

Having root_squash enabled won't prevent Workbench from starting and running, it will only prevent the launcher process from setting the owner of files within the mounted directory. In addition, certain features of Workbench such as using session timeout kill,  require disabling root_squash on shared storage paths.
 
Formally speaking, we don't have any guidelines for using root_squash with Workbench. It's technically considered an unsupported configuration, however, we do realize that it is a security measure to protect NFS shares from malicious remote users. The decision to disable it should be made by your own IT/security teams. Feel free to have this enabled when you mount your drives if your organization requires it.
 
If you do go ahead and disable root squash, you may see some warnings. However, feel free to ignore these.