autofs problem: mount_get_devid: server not responding

[Jiang Li_1]

Hi All,

We just started using AUTOFS instead of the old automount. But the /var/adm/syslog.log has a lot of below logs:
=====================
automountd[769]: mount_get_devid: server SERVERNAME not responding for /home/user1
=====================
Users will face intermittent access problem to the automounted directories. Sometimes ok, sometimes not ok.

The nfs client is HP-UX10.20, the NFS server is HP-UX11.0. Before we use AUTOFS, the automount works fine here.

Is there anybody here can help me on this issue ?

[Dietmar Konermann]

Install a recent NFS/ONC cumulative patch on the client. The were some issues, especially with PHNE_20628. Latest is PHNE_25234.

Best regards...
Dietmar.

[Jiang Li_1]

Is there any solution without installing patch ? Thanks.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi,

Depending on the activity you may have to increase 'biod's on the client side and nfsds on the server side if the patch does not fix your problem.

Particularly on the server side, if you are running with the default number of nfsds, then you may receive these errors depending on the activity.

Look for the Doc.ID: KBAN00000261 in the itrc.hp.com's technical knowledge base. It explains NFS performance.

-Sri

[Michael Steele_2]

Can you stop autofs and NFS mount /home/user1? This would isolate the problem to NFS or not.

[S.K. Chan]

When you have various different OS environment and using autofs in it, you would see some problem related to it's performance. When I migrated from automount to autofs one of the improtant pre-requisite is to be up-to-date on patches. The one I'm talking about is ONC/NFS General Release/Performance patch for both 11.0 and 10.20. We made sure this patch is loaded on all clients and servers before moving them to autofs. So far I have not seen such error. You may want to install this patch at least on your client side and see how it performs.

[Jiang Li_1]

Thanks for your reply.

Acutally, The problem is intermittent not continous. For example, you can't list /home/user1, but after 2 seconds, you can. Stop AUTOFS and using NFS mount should be ok. But I don't want to roll back to the old way.

Regards