NFS problems

[DLH]

We have one server that we export a lv file system /usr/local and a directory /var/mail using NFS. The host server reboots every Saturday night and then the client servers reboot one hour later. The last 3 Saturdays the client servers were unable to mount the /usr/local file system but they were able to mount the /var/mail directory after reboot. I have to reboot the host server again and then mount /usr/local on every client. The client servers see /usr/local as being stale after the host server reboots for the first time and then after the client servers reboot they don't see /usr/local at all. Things have worked fine for 3 years. Anyone have a clue whats going on here?

[harry d brown jr]

Check the time on your servers, are they out of sync? Also, have you the latest patches?

[Michael Tully]

Hi,

First thing I would look at is whether there
has been any changes to any of the systems,
i.e. Check the contents of the /etc/exports file
on the server and the /etc/fstab file on each
of ther clients. Has there been any patches
loaded to either your NFS clients or the server
itself?

-Michael

[T G Manikandan]

hello,
Just do a exportfs -a.
Sometimes the file systems are not properly exported.
This should solve it.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

We need more details. Are you using hardmounts or automount?. If you are using automount, I would see /var/mail mounting automatically once the systems come back up as this directory would be accessed most of the time. I am not sure what you use /usr/local for. Probably you can do a cd /usr/local and it may mount through automount.

If it is hardmount, then you need to check /etc/fstab on the clients to see if /usr/local is specified to be mounted from through NFS.

For both the cases, make sure /usr/local is exported properly on the server. Check /etc/exportfs file on the nfs server.

-Sri

[DLH]

Here is some additional info about our NFS problem. /usr/local is used for the system admins home directories and to store scripts etc. that are used across all or most of the servers. We are not using automount because it was flagged as a security issue and we were forced to remove it several months ago. All the servers have been static for the last several months and are up to date with patches. Syslog.log is now reporting some "free extent bitmaps" that were marked bad. It looks like we probably have a problem with one of the disks that are being used for /usr/local