HPUX 9.1 diskless cluster client Linux NFS Problem

[Peter Kielbasiewicz]

We still have some HPUX 9.1 cluster servers with diskless clients running legacy test software.
Most applications are NFS mounted from an HPUX 11 NFS server to the cluster servers.
These NFS mounts are then automatically also seen on the diskless cluster clients.

I recently did a test to replace the HPUX 11 NFS server with a linux NFS server and found the strange phenomenon that the cluster servers can well access the NFS mounts from the linux box but the diskless cluster clients can not.

The error message is like /nfs/linuxsvr/applics: not owner.

I played with access rights and ownerships but the message did not change.
The mount point is now 777 root:root but the clients still can not see it.

As I said there is no problem to see the linux export to the cluster server. The cluster server does not pass the mounts to its clients though.

Does anybody have an idea how to get the NFS mounts seen by the clients?

[harry d brown jr]

What are these diskless clients?

What error messages are seen by the client? (is /nfs/linuxsvr/applics: not owner. the error mesage on the client?)

What error messages are seen on the server?

What are the mount permissions?

live free or die
harry d brown jr

[Peter Kielbasiewicz]

What are these diskless clients?
e.g.
HP-UX prdsvr00 B.09.10 B 9000/43T Server
HP-UX prdclnt1 B.09.10 B 9000/43T Client
HP-UX prdclnt2 B.09.10 B 9000/43T Client
HP-UX prdclnt3 B.09.10 B 9000/42E Client

What error messages are seen by the client? (is /nfs/linuxsvr/applics: not owner. the error mesage on the client?)

> bdf /nfs/linuxsvr/applics # run on prdsvr00
> Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
> linuxsvr:/applics 8254240 4599488 3235460 59% /nfs/linuxsvr/applics

> bdf /nfs/linuxsvr/applics # run on prdclnt1
> Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
> /nfs/linuxsvr/applics: Not owner

What error messages are seen on the server?
> There are no error message on the server

What are the mount permissions?
> The export permissions on the NFS server are *(ro,sync)

[harry d brown jr]

It looks like you are you daisy chaining the NFS mounts, is this true??

live free or die
harry d brown jr

[Peter Kielbasiewicz]

Hello Harry,
I am not daisy chaining.
With UX 9 HP was using a proprietary mechanism for diskless clients which was NOT nfs based.
HP was using hidden directories to store client specific configurations on the server (known as context dependend files).
All other files (including nfs mounts) were passed from the diskless server directly to the clients.
Thus you only needed to do an nfs mount on the server and it was automatically forwarded to all diskless clients attached to that server.
I suppose that there is something in the HP implementation of NFS which does handle this, and this part is missing in the Linux NFS implementation but I am not sure if I am right here. It could also be some export or mount options which are missing.
As I stated before there are no problems when the NFS export comes from an HPUX Box with HPUX 10 or 11 but it does not work when exporting from Linux.
The only thing I did was to add an entry to the /etc/checklist file on the HPUX cluster server which gave me mount access to the Linux Box.
It worked as expected on the cluster server but it is not accessible by the diskless clients.

excerpt from /etc/checklist
> hpuxsvr:/applics /nfs/hpuxsvr/prodapps nfs soft 0 0
> linuxsvr:/applics /nfs/linuxsvr/applics.org nfs soft 0 0

[harry d brown jr]

have a look at http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/interop.html


live free or die
harry d brown jr