ls hangs on NFS mounted HOME directory

[Saurav Sarkar]

Hi,
we have our HOME directories mounted via NFS. now sometimes doing an ls in the home directory hangs. even ^C doesn't work. this is especially true in my hp-ux 11.00 machine and with my login. but when I login to some other hp machine, ls works fine. the home directory is automounted. also i run bash from my login shell sh. when i logout from bash, it hangs indefinitely. i have to press ^C repeatedly to come out of bash. can anyone help?

btw: i tried running tusc on ls. but surprisingly, it runs fine without hanging

saurav

[Armin Feller]

Hi,

check with:

# nfsstat -m

which version of NFS is used. If there are not the same versions on client and server, please mount the HOME directories with option e.g. '-o vers=2' if version2 and so on.

Regards,
Armin

[john korterman]

Hi Saurav,

If you have many files in your home dirs, then consult this link:

http://www4.itrc.hp.com/service/cki/docDisplay.do?docLocale=en_US&docId=200000062925401&admit=-938907319+1038928416832+28353475

regards,
John K.

[Saurav Sarkar]

I tried nfsstat -m but it failed with the message "Unbale to open mount table". I also found out that ls is aliased to ls -F which hangs but ls works fine.

saurav

[T G Manikandan]

You have to check whether the NFS file system is exported fine on the other system.

Also check the latest NFS patches.

[Michael Tully]

Make sure that you have the appropriate amount of nfsd daemons running. To check this have a look in /etc/rc.config.d/nfsconf
The default on HPUX 11 is only 4. On 11i it is 16. Something to think about.

[Lisa Mauer]

Do you have a firewall between the servers? We had this same problem and modifications needed to be made to the firewall. Also check to be sure the servers are listed correctly in DNS if you are using DNS. It does a reverse lookup and if it can't find it correctly it will hang. Check your rhosts file to be sure the servers are listed there as well.

[Saurav Sarkar]

There is no firewall between my system and NFS server and DNS entries are correct. I am not using any .rhosts file, if that is what you are talking about. The problem is that this problem is not always repeateable.

saurav

[Armin Feller]

Hi,

please do:

# what /usr/bin/nfsstat

then check the permissions of:

# ll /var/adm/sw/save/PHNE_/NFS-CORE/usr/bin/nfsstat
-r-sr-xr-x 1 root bin 32768 Nov 6 1997 nfsstat
# ll /usr/bin/nfsstat
-r-sr-xr-x 1 root bin 28672 Nov 20 15:10 nfsstat

The ownership should be root/bin, if not please change them.

Regards,
Armin

[harry d brown jr]

saurav

Can you post your

/etc/mnttab file??

Also, when was the last time you patched this machine? Is it 64bit?

live free or die
harry

[Bill Hassell]

NFS is a VERY fragile filesystem and both the network and the server must be stable. First, don't even think about running NFS in this manner (ie, exported $HOME directories) without *all* the LAN and NFS patches. Then get nfsfstat working. You will likely see a lot of problems, probably related to the number of server (and possibly client) daemons. For a busy NFS server, these need to be bumped up a LOT.

And most important, get Dave Olker's book on NFS. It's a bit humbling to see just how much work it takes to keep NFS healthy. Some sysadmins turn it off on production servers since it can seriously affect production schedules when it doesn't quite work right.

[Shannon Petry]

I can rarely add anything to Bill's wizdom, but this is one of those rare cases when I can.

O'Reilly and Associates publishes a book "NIS and NFS Administration".

I'd recommend this book first, as it is lighter reading. It takes a beginners approach to tackeling NFS, as well as gives some history, setup, and suggestions. It will give you basic methods of testing, and point you to other reading if NFS is not failing, but TCP/IP or a different service is.

To backup what Bill stated, I turn off NFS on any machine that is not a file server, or client. I support OS/Hardware on 5 Oracle servers, 2 compute servers and 1 cluster, 4 file servers, and approximately 100 file clients for CAD/CAM. NFS only runs on the file servers and CAD/CAM clients.

Regards,
Shannon

[Saurav Sarkar]

Result of
# what /usr/bin/nfsstat
/usr/bin/nfsstat:
nfsstat: PHNE_17101

# ls -l /usr/bin/nfsstat
-r-sr-xr-x 1 root bin 28672 Oct 21 1999 /usr/bin/nfsstat

There is no directory /var/adm/sw/save/PHNE_17101

This is a 64 bit machine. I don't know when it was last patched, as I am not an administrator, but I don't think it hasn't been patched in last one year or so. I am also attaching my /etc/mnttab.
Our HOME directories are under /moon_1.

saurav