Really strange: intermittent "bad interpreter: Stale NFS file handle" error

[Brian McEntire]

Hello HP-UX Gurus! =-)

We have a J5000 running HP-UX 11i that has been performing sluggishly for several weeks. Load is around 3. A few users are running Matlab or intensive home grown applications, so the load isn't that suprising but the interactive response feels slower than usual.

What is suprising is something I just noticed today.

Writing a couple of trivially small/simple shell scripts. They begin with:

#!/usr/bin/perl

Every once in a while, when I start the script, I get an error message:

topstudy.pl: /usr/bin/perl: bad interpreter: Stale NFS file handle

(topstudy is the name of my script)

The stale NFS file handle error also comes sometimes when I start another script that has #!/bin/sh as the shell interpreter.

Any ideas what is causing this?

[Navin Bhat_2]

Well first try to unmount and remount the NFS directory. Then check your nfs related patches. apply all the dependencies and then see if you are still getting NFS errors.


>> what's causing this?


1.Basically the remote file on the NFS Server either goes away all together

2. or the inode of the file the client was accessing has changed.

[Brian McEntire]

Also, 'bdf' does not return any error messages and all NFS mounted file systems are working fine. /bin and /usr/bin, of course, are local file systems anyway.

[Navin Bhat_2]

Have you checked the patches? I suggest remounting them anyway.

Since this is occuring once in a while only suggest you run bdf the moment you get this error. Are there absolutely no errors related to NFS in the syslog or dmesg?

[Mel Burslan]

Are these NFS filesystems being mounted via automounter ? At some bizzare time I have seen the automounted directories causing hangs or giving stale handle errors. I am not sure if there is an immediate fix for that.

[RAC_1]

dmesg
Do you have some NFS mounts on this system?
If yes, are all they still available?

Anil

[Brian McEntire]

Thanks for the responses!

I will check patch freshness tomorrow. I will also assign points then. :-)

A related question: does HP-UX 11i allow a remount like Linux does? This is a busy system. If it is possible, I can instantaneously umount and remount the file systems, but I don't want to kick everyone off.

To answer one of the questions... Yes, there are NFS mounts on this system and Yes, they all seem to be working fine.

I still don't understand why I'd get a "bad interpreter" message for a shell on a local file system even if NFS file systems were acting up.