On Thu, Sep 01, 2005 at 03:21:06PM -0400, Peter Schwenk wrote:
I've got this bizarre situation with a bunch of my Linux client boxes
that NFS mount homes and other stuff from my Panther Server (Xserve
G5 DP). I don't have a handle on whether the Linux clients are to
blame or the server.
When some of the systems boot, they hang when trying to mount their
shares. I'm using static mounting in the /etc/fstab. I can reboot
any number of times, and it keeps happening.
Which systems are you rebooting? The clients or the MacOSX server?
If you're rebooting the server, you could be hitting a server issue:
On MacOSX NFS servers prior to Tiger, the NFS file handles contain
the "file system IDs" of the exported volumes. These IDs contain the
major/minor device numbers of the volumes. Unfortunately, on
MacOSX these
device numbers aren't guaranteed to be the same between reboots.
So, this
can cause the NFS file handles to change - which will cause NFS
clients
that already have the exports mounted to get ESTALE(70) or EIO(5)
errors.
The workaround is to have the NFS clients remount the exports.
If you're rebooting the clients and you are seeing this problem then
the problem is something else.
If I disable the
firewall, which I'm not thrilled about, they can then connect back up
just fine. The strange thing is that the firewall was on before, and
they were okay to connect up until some strange, magical event
happens that screws it up.
NFS can have issues with firewalls because the related RPC protcols
(e.g. "mountd", "statd" and "lockd") are not available on fixed,
well-known ports.
There is no indication of anything odd going on in the server's
logs. Should I suspect the client being wacky in some way?
The best thing to do here is to get network packet traces to see
what's
happening between the NFS client and the NFS server. I would highly
recommend using a tool like ethereal to inspect the network traffic.
You may need to get packet traces on both the client and server
if you need to determine if some packets aren't making it from
one side to the other.
HTH
--macko
