Stale File handles keep coming back

[Kris Vassallo <kris@linuxcertified.com>]

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I am experiencing a problem with stale file handles, and I have not been
able to find an answer in the archives nor has doing anything in the
readme helped. I apologize if an answer has already been posted
regarding an issue such as this. After many frustrating hours of
troubleshooting I am hoping for some help. The mail is long but I am
hoping that it answers all the questions. 
    
    I am experiencing the following problem: I have a group of  ~20 nfs
clients (2.4.22-1.2115.nptlsmp) which are all mounting a /home directory
off of 1 NFS server (2.6.11-1.14_FC3smp); the server was upgraded FROM
2.4.22-1.2115.nptlsmp last week. All servers are running NFS v3 over
UDP. 
    As soon as I did the upgrade people started getting stale file
handles, so I shut down all clients and the server, booted the server
back up and then brought the clients back up so that everything would be
in sync. However, this did not resolve the issue. 
    I now have people complaining that if they do a ls in a specific
directory within their home directory, (this happens for all users in
their own private home directory, which I believe rules out the issue of
having someone else manipulating the file) they get an error thats says:
ls: .: Stale NFS file handle .

    *What I don't understand is that if you were to touch a file within
that directory, all of a sudden the contents of the directory magically
become visible.  Removing the directory, recopying the directory back,
and then using for a while works but then all of a sudden it goes stale
again!! 

The following is the content of my /etc/exports
/home        10.113.1.0/26(sync,rw,no_wdelay,no_root_squash) \
                10.113.1.64/26(sync,no_wdelay,rw) \
                10.113.1.128/26(sync,no_wdelay,rw) \
                10.113.1.192/26(sync,no_wdelay,rw)

Clients mount the share with defaults. 

I am not changing anything in the /etc/exports file. The directory has
not actally been deleted as I can go to the server and do a ls on the
directory and see the contents of it (strangely this makes the stale
file handle go away). I have just added no_subtree_check to the exports
file and have not yet tested this. We have not hot swapped any hard
disks in our RAID array. This is an ext3 file system which I believe
supports permanent inode numbers. This is really weird and I can't think
of anything that would cause this but something with nfs and the 2.6.11
kernel?

Please CC me on any responses.
Thank you very much in advance for any help. 
-Kris


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