autofs automount server not responding errors

[Peter Kielbasiewicz]

After updating systems to the latest patches released for HP-UX 10.20 I frequently get the errors listed below in syslog.
Unfortunately I can not upgrade to HPUX11.

Any clues what can be done here are greatly appreciated?

I already tried -timeo=20 in /etc/auto.direct but the symptoms are the same.

Fact is, that all mounts are indeed working but sometimes the desktop or apps hang due to timeouts. (The users home dir is on the nfs mounts)
We checked the network setup but everything is fine. Systems with same hardware but older patch level do not show the errors.


Jul 28 09:49:22 host1 automountd[2255]: server prmaster not responding
Jul 28 09:52:42 host1 automountd[2255]: server prmaster not responding
Jul 28 09:52:42 host1 automountd[2255]: mount_get_devid: server prmaster not responding for /nfs/prmaster/prd2
Jul 28 09:52:42 host1 automountd[2255]: mount_get_devid: server prmaster not responding for /nfs/prmaster/home
Jul 28 09:52:42 host1 automountd[2255]: server apmaster not responding


swlist -l product | grep -i nfs gives:

NFS B.10.20 ONC/NFS; Network-File System,Information Services,Utilities
PHCO_15339 B.10.00.00.AA fsclean(1M) support for NFSv3
PHCO_15340 B.10.00.00.AA /sbin/is_local_root support for NFSv3
PHCO_15341 B.10.00.00.AA mountall(1M) support for NFSv3 and CacheFS
PHCO_15343 B.10.00.00.AA umountall(1M) support for NFSv3
PHKL_17573 B.10.00.00.AA ki/nfs vasusage, ACE 2 bundle cumulative patch
PHKL_20126 B.10.00.00.AA NFS diskless client kernel patch (ACE 199912
PHNE_20628 B.10.00.00.AA NFS/NIS cumulative megapatch
PHNE_28886 B.10.00.00.AA NFS/NIS General Release/Performance Patch

[Steve Steel · Accepted solution]

Hi

Looks to me like a problem here

PHNE_20628 B.10.00.00.AA NFS/NIS cumulative megapatch
PHNE_28886 B.10.00.00.AA NFS/NIS General Release/Performance Patch

28886 is the replacement for 20628 and they should not both show up

swremove 28886
swremove 20628
swinstall 28886

see

http://www.rbi.cs.uni-frankfurt.de/hp-service/patches/s700_800/10.X/PHNE_28886.txt

Steve Steel

[Dave Olker]

Hi Peter,

If unininstalling/reinstalling the patches does not resolve your problem, then my first question is: which patches did you install recently when you updated your system? Your description says "After updating systems to the latest patches released for HP-UX 10.20", but it doesn't list the actual patches you installed. Did you only install the latest ONC/NFS patches and their dependencies? Did you install 100 other patches at the same time for other subsystems?

Did you recently change from using automount to AutoFS? This system is clearly running AutoFS but are the other "working" systems also running AutoFS? The AutoFS for 10.20 is based on the older ONC 1.2 technology. We recently released a greatly improved version of AutoFS based on the ONC 2.3 code base, but you need to be running HP-UX 11i (at least) to install it.

Why can this system not be updated to HP-UX 11i? Is it an application issue?

How many NFS mounted filesystems are listed in your /etc/mnttab on this system? Were *any* of those servers down during this time period of 9:49:22 - 9:52:42? Even if the NFS filesystem is not one of the users' home directories, if there was a filesystem in the /etc/mnttab file for a server that was not responding it could impact AutoFS' ability to service requests for the users' home directories and potentially cause these messages to log in syslog.

Regards,

Dave

[Peter Kielbasiewicz]

Thanks a lot,
I uninstalled PHNE_28886 and PHNE_20628 as suggested and re-installed only PHNE_28886 and it seems to work OK now.
What disturbs me though is that normally you do not need to uninstall a superseeded patch before installing the superseeder. The patch update should either take care for this by itself or issue a warning and do no update.

[Brian Hackley]

Peter,

Did you examine /var/adm/sw/swagent.log carefully for any clues?

Also, 10.20 is no longer supported by HP. Please consider following Dave Olker's suggestion to update to HPUX 11.11 and the AutoFS Patch bundle.

Hope that helps, Brian