PFS troubles

[Rick Garland]

Hi all:

Working on an L2000 with HP-UX 11.00.

Got bit with pfs again. Has been awhile but it does seem painful when it happens. Do have the PHCO_16438 PFS Cumulative installed and configured. The cdrom is pfs_mounted and then some of the processes seem to die. This causes problems when trying to do some simple system commands as they very often hang. Looking at the 'ps -ef | grep pfs' output shows that the remaining pfs processes are attached to init and they cannot be killed off.

What causes the pfs processes to go wacky? They are there one minute and then they are not all there the next minute.

Has a way be found to clear the funky pfs processes without having to do a reboot? Typically get the "NFS server not responding', bdf hangs, access to the cdrom is not available - either through the OS or physically, yada, yada, yada.

Would be nice clear up these pfs issues without having to bounce the box. But have not been able to find anything yet.

[Christopher Caldwell · Accepted solution]

Normally I see pfs problems when someone exits the terminal window that started the pfs daemons without prefacing the commands with something like nohup.

I've also see folks accidently remove a CD without unmounting it, or I've seen folks kill the pfs daemons without unmounting the CDs - both of which seem to "hang" pfs in never-never land.

According to the response center, these processes are not killable - since the daemons are hung in hardware and driver.

This is inconvenient at best. Nothing like an outage after installing sqlnet. What is this, Windoze? ;-)

[Shannon Petry]

The big problem here is that HP does not support PFS, so your stuck with what they give you...

It's a real pain that while the other flavors of UNIX have had for quite a while the ability to read multiple formats of CDRFS, HP is STILL stuck in the dark ages. Copy the linux file system drivers and plagerize as many others have, and get support!

I dont really care if it understands Joliet, but at least the RR format in completeness.

Other than that, I'd recommend that if you mount a cd with pfs, make sure that you unmount it as soon as your done with it. It is easy to say umount instead of pfs_umount when trying to get at the cd, and then your hosed!

Other than that, look on YMI's www site, cuz their alot more up to data and speed than HP when it comes to CDRFS!

Regards,
Shannon

[John Poff]

Rick,

Since you have the PFS patch installed, the only other trick I know of is to make sure that your statd and lockd daemons are running. That one bit me so many times I finally put it into the script I use for starting the pfs daemons.

/usr/sbin/rpc.lockd
/usr/sbin/rpc.statd

nohup /usr/sbin/pfs_mountd /var/tmp/pfs_mountd.out 2>&1 &
nohup /usr/sbin/pfsd > /var/tmp/pfsd.out 2>&1 &



With all the problems I've had fighting pfs over the years, I've come up with some interesting ideas for what p.f.s. really stands for. Of course, I can't repeat them in polite company. ;)

Good luck!

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Rick:

For whatever this is worth, the KB doesn't seem to offer anything more than to make sure that you launch the pfs daemons with 'nohup' in the background and mount to the raw device file. Of this, you a probably all too aware.

I've been burned by runaway 'bdf' syndrome too (haven't we all?).

I follow the same conservative approach Shannon mentions -- I have a script that mounts and unmounts the CD and I only leave it mounted long enough to use it! Shannon's pointer to the Young Minds web site is probably worth the trip.

With regards!

...JRF...

[Rick Garland]

Hi all:

Many thanks for the feedback. Just didn't want to feel so alone. I will implement the scripting to do the work for us so there isn't somebody forgetting a step and PFS decides to go off the deep end. Yes, I do have the meaning for PFS as well, I don't believe it stands for Portable File System. My definition is Piece of ... (lets stay tame here, don't want to corrupt the kids!)

Again, many thanks for the comments!

[Steffi Jones_1]

Hi Rick,

here is a bit more information:

Young Minds wrote the source code and has a support line as well.
I used to get the newest binaries from the ftp site ftp.ymi.com in dir /pub/hp-pfs.
I just tried it, but they have set the permissions on /pub/hp-pfs to 400. So I couldn't verify that they still maintain this site.
I tried to give them a call, but it was outside their business hours :-) Phone # 800-496-4237.
Their webpage www.ymi.com doesn't give any hint about pfs software.

But here are a few things which I have seen as commmon problems:

1) make sure not only pfs is patched, but nfs as well
2) don't have root in more than 8 groups
3) start the daemons in the correct order
4) don't kill the daemons before the cd's unmounted
5) don't let an open pfs_mount session sit on your box for a longer time
6) if bdf hangs or similiar symptoms ... reboot

Why processes go wacky? Sorry, no clue.

Take care,
Steffi Jones