cp: cannot create /xxx/xxx/file: Unknown error

Some of my users are seeing the following error when copying file.
cp: cannot create /xxx/xxx/file: Unknown error

Users are logged into HP 9000 K570's application servers there data is located on a NFS server.

The problem seems to be isolated to one partition on the NFS server. The user can cp this file to other partition on the nfs server just not the /home1 partition.

7 REPLIES 7

Hi Russell,

This seems like a premission issue on /home1 filesystem.
Either the filesystem is exported Read only or that particular directory does not have the proper permissions.

Have the users been able do an exact copy anytime before? This way you can narrow down the problem and see if any permissions have changed lately.

- KS

Hi Russell,

Are you perchance running the auto-mounter?
I'm surprised that you are getting an 'unknown' error - that is not typical of permissions errors. If you are running the auto-mount, I suggest that you stop/start it.

One other thing, you might want to check the permissions of the /home1 mountpoint when /home1 is unmounted. It may be too restrictive yet when examined while mounted may appear just fine.

Hope this helps, Clay

If it ain't broke, I can fix that.

We had this problem once before and went away. Now is back again. I have unexported and then re-exported no luck. The problem seem to be with users who login that have accounts in /home5 only. permission are wide open for testing.

Clay,
Yes we are using automounter to mount our partitions.
we are using automounter -host /net. This problem seems to happening on all my 6 application servers and is isolated to users who have there home account in /home5. I will try stopping automount.

One more thing to try, is that (acc to Clay) umount /home1 on the client box, check its underlying permissions (it should be at least 755). Then remounting it. ALso, are the users in /home5 who are having problems in a particular group?

You might also want to try and make the /home1 on the server to be 777. and test and see if the problem still exists.

- KS

Hi Russell,

I assume /home5 is also auto-mounted. I would very carefully check its exports entry and also check it's mountpoint directory for permissions.

One other thing to try, you might hard NFS mount /home1 on one of your application servers and then see if one of your /home5 guys can copy a file to the explicitly NFS mounted directory. This way, we would know if we are fighting the auto-mounter or NFS itself.

My 2 cents, Clay

If it ain't broke, I can fix that.

Thank everyone for your help. I think I have found the problem. After looking into this a little further I found that when I did a vi on a file on a partition that had a quota on it vi gave an system error 61449. I search HP's web site and found a patch for this problem. I checked to make sure it was a quota problem by turning off the quota on the filesystems I was trying to copy to { quotaoff /homexx. Tryied the copy again and it worked. I will load this patch PHKL_16921 and see if this solves the problem.