FRUSTRATING AutoFS/Automounter problem...

[Kenneth Platz]

Hullo everyone,

I'm having a very frustrating problem with the automounter on one of our servers. It's a rp74xx running 11i, with pretty recent patches (June 2004) and the ENHAUTOFS product loaded.

Here's the deal. We can't get any of our mounts to actually work. Whenever we try to start the automounter (manually), we get:

[/] root@bishop #/usr/sbin/automount -v
automount: mount /software2: Invalid argument
automount: no mounts
automount: no unmounts

We only have the following entries in our /etc/auto_master file:
/- /etc/auto.direct -vers=3,proto=udp

And the /etc/auto.direct is:
/software2 elrito:/software

I *can* successfully perform a:

[/] root@bishop # mount -F nfs elrito:/software /software2

However, automounter is being completely flaky. Any ideas?

[Biswajit Tripathy]

Do you have any luck using SAM to mount them?
If you haven't tried using SAM, then you probably
should.

- Biswajit

[Kenneth Platz]

SAM apparently thinks that /software2 is mounted, even though it isn't. I tried stopping and starting the automounter, but SAM appears brain-damaged.

Besides, we've got 50 servers to configure this on, and I'd prefer to be able to fix this without resorting to SAM.

[Biswajit Tripathy]

I hope you did not do any of the things listed in
the warning section of automount(1M) manpages.
My suggestion would be to reboot the system and
try the command again (make sure you are using
proper syntax).

- Biswajit

[Nguyen Anh Tien]

I suggest you use /etc/fstab to mount that file system:
adding this line at last line :
server:/mnt /mnt nfs rw,hard 0 0

Kindly respond
tienna

[Biswajit Tripathy]

Another point is, you might want to make sure that
the AUTOFS varieble is set to 1 in "nfsconf" file.
You probably know that, if this is set to 0, the old
flavor of automount will be used instead of the
new "autofs", which is pretty much a dead product.

Ofcourse, you could always mount using NFS by
adding entry in "/etc/fstab" and mounting by
"mount -a".

- Biswajit

[Kenneth Platz]

As I said earlier, we *can* use the /etc/fstab to mount this, but this is only one filesystem - we've stripped the whole auto.direct file to a single mount to try to determine the cause. Once we get this one mount working, we've got a number of others we've got to add in, and due to the environment, we want to use the automounter.

I have checked, and the following variables are set in /etc/rc.config.d/nfsconf:

AUTOMOUNT=1
AUTO_MASTER="/etc/auto_master"
AUTO_OPTIONS="-f $AUTO_MASTER"
AUTOFS=1
AUTOMOUNT_OPTIONS=""
AUTOMOUNTD_OPTIONS=""

Any other ideas?

[Dietmar Konermann]

Kenneth,

what worries me is that SAM complains about /software2 being already mounted. Pls check if some orphaned entry is present in /etc/mnttab.

Best regards...
Dietmar.

[Sanjay_6]

Hi,

Try this,

# cat /etc/auto_master

/- /etc/auto.direct

# cat /etc/auto.direct

/software2 -vers=3,proto=udp elrito:/software

Hope this helps.

Regds

[Kenneth Platz]

Dietmar,

I did not say that SAM is complaining, it is just showing /software2 as being mounted, which is incorrect. Yes, the automounter is running, but it is not currently actually mounting anything. It's just showing incorrect information.

[Dietmar Konermann]

SAM needs to get this info from somewhere... so what's in mnttab?

[Kenneth Platz]

It is not in mnttab. I suspect that SAM is just doing its own parsing of the /etc/auto_master and /etc/auto.direct files

I think we've gotten sidetracked here though -- what is causing the "Invalid argument" errors. Those I am certain are the crux of the problem.

[Dietmar Konermann]

You may be right with you assmumption anbout sam. And it indeed looks like your autofs mount fails with EINVAL.

Just tested your config files on one of our boxes. No problems found so far... so maybe something very basic is wrong on your system?

Run check_patches to get an idea if kernel libs have their expected checksums.

Is the autofsc driver in the kernel?

Sorry... have to leave for week end now. Good luck.

Dietmar.

[Kenneth Platz]

Dietmar,

I just checked, and autofsc IS in the kernel, and check_patches does not report any errors.

Any other suggestions, anyone?

[Biswajit Tripathy]

May be a slight off topic, but if you want to
find exactly what command SAM is using to reach
at the wrong conclusion, you could see sam log
by using following command:

# /usr/sam/bin/samlog_viewer

BTW, did you reboot the system and tried it
again? As the manual section says many thing
can go wrong quickly with automount and I was
wondering if you, while trying out all options, did
do any of those.

- Biswajit