NFS and Current Working Directory

[Steve Fosdick]

I am having an interesting problem with NFS, with HP-UX 10.20 as the client and Linux 2.4 as the server.

If I change directory into the NFS mounted directory asking for the current directory seems to work correctly, but if I go any deeper into the directory tree 'pwd' seems to treat the top of the mounted filesystem as if it was root.

In this example an NFS filesystem is mounted on /data ...

# cd /data
# /bin/pwd
/data
# cd ftp
# /bin/pwd
/ftp
# echo $PWD
/data/ftp

The example shows that when in the directory /data/ftp the current directory is incorrectly reported as /ftp (while the shell variable $PWD
is correct).

Has anyone seen something similar or have any idea what might be going on
here?

The HP-UX Client has patch PHNE_25234 and all those it depends on installed. The HP-UX client works fine with an NFS filesystem mounted from a Solaris 2.6 server and the same Solaris 2.6 server can mount the filesystem from the Linux server without the same problem.

TiA
Steve.

[Karthik S S]

if you have one more level of directory say,

/data/ftp/dir1

what does the pwd command return?? is it /dir1 or /ftp/dir1.

-Regards,
Karthik S S

[Pete Randall]

Steve,

I can't say as I've seen that particular set of symptoms but I can definitely say that NFS is known to be flaky, particularly in 10.20 (and older) versions. We've had much better results in 11.0 and even better in our 11i systems. There are fewer and fewer problems the more recent you get.

I'm sure you know that 10.20 was obsoleted as of last month. If you absolutely cannot migrate, make sure you have the very latest NFS patches. If you can migrate, I encourage you to do so (via cold-install is best when transitioning from 10.20) as soon as possible.


Pete

[Steve Fosdick]

I tried a deeper directory:

# cd /data/ftp/woosh
# /bin/pwd
/ftp/woosh

[Pete Randall]

Steve,

I was trying to search the patch database to find out what the latest NFS Genereal Release patch is, and, interestingly enough, a search for NFS produces "too many patches". I guess this supports my contention that NFS has gotten better with time (though I still consider it flaky).

In lieu of being able to find the latest NFS patch, have you at least got the last General Release bundle applied? You can get it from here:

http://www.software.hp.com/SUPPORT_PLUS/gr.html


Pete

[Steve Fosdick]

Thanks Pete,

I also got the same message about there being too many patches so I selected to browse the patches and to display all of them and used the Find feature in my web browser.

I have tried installing the general release patch set you pointed me to and it has solved a different problem (with it not being possible to unmount an NFS filesystem) but unfortunately not the problem with NFS and the current directory.

Steve.

[Andy Pearman]

I have had exactly this same problem on a 10.20 machine mounting off a 2.4 kernel Linux server.

I've noticed a bigger problem as well. If the user's login shell is set to tcsh (we have a fairly recent version of tcsh) the machine freezes on login with the tcsh process using 100% CPU.

The 10.20 machine is used as a login server (using HP Vue), which means simply telling the user not to use the machine means he can't have his Vue Window Manager stuff.

Look like there is no fix for it though.

Gavin

[Peter Kielbasiewicz]

We are using HP-UX 10.20 with nfs v3 activated.
You can see your rpc revs with rpcinfo -p.

In RedHat Linux Workstation nfs v3 is not activated by default. The server installation seems to have it though.

Thus building a new kernel with nfs v3 support should solve your problem