possible client stale filehandle bug?

[Garrick Staples <garrick@usc.edu>]

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Hi all,
   I have lots of storage in a large Solaris samfs environment that is NFS
shared to a large number of Solaris and RHEL3 clients.  Under some conditions,
linux apps have been getting stale filehandles during the normal course of
their activity.  Various file handling syscalls like read() or open() might
error.  Lots of renames and setattrs calls seem to trigger the problem.  
'ci' and 'cvs commit' are particularly good at this.

It seems that the Solaris clients never report any such errors, only the Linux
clients.  However, watching 'snoop' on the Solaris NFS server, I see that it IS
returning stale file handles to both OSes, but Solaris clients seem to retry
the request several times; and the Linux clients immediately pass the error up
to the application.

Is there some condition that the 2.4 kernel is handling incorrectly?


Sample snippet from the 'snoop' on the Solaris server with a Solaris client
waiting...

rcf102.usc.edu -> almaak.usc.edu NFS C LOOKUP3 FH=B41B Entries.Log
almaak.usc.edu -> rcf102.usc.edu NFS R LOOKUP3 OK FH=7BFE
rcf102.usc.edu -> almaak.usc.edu TCP D=2049 S=610     Ack=3071279992 Seq=337022612 Len=0 Win=64240
rcf102.usc.edu -> almaak.usc.edu NFS C ACCESS3 FH=7BFE (read,modify,extend,execute)
almaak.usc.edu -> rcf102.usc.edu TCP D=610 S=2049     Ack=337022752 Seq=3071279992 Len=0 Win=64240
almaak.usc.edu -> rcf102.usc.edu NFS R ACCESS3 Stale NFS file handle
rcf102.usc.edu -> almaak.usc.edu NFS C LOOKUP3 FH=B41B Entries.Log
almaak.usc.edu -> rcf102.usc.edu NFS R LOOKUP3 OK FH=7BFE
rcf102.usc.edu -> almaak.usc.edu NFS C LOOKUP3 FH=B41B Entries.Log
almaak.usc.edu -> rcf102.usc.edu NFS R LOOKUP3 OK FH=7BFE
rcf102.usc.edu -> almaak.usc.edu TCP D=2049 S=610     Ack=3071280516 Seq=337023056 Len=0 Win=64240
rcf102.usc.edu -> almaak.usc.edu NFS C ACCESS3 FH=7BFE (read,modify,extend,execute)
almaak.usc.edu -> rcf102.usc.edu TCP D=610 S=2049     Ack=337023196 Seq=3071280516 Len=0 Win=64240
almaak.usc.edu -> rcf102.usc.edu NFS R ACCESS3 Stale NFS file handle
rcf102.usc.edu -> almaak.usc.edu NFS C LOOKUP3 FH=B41B Entries.Log
almaak.usc.edu -> rcf102.usc.edu NFS R LOOKUP3 OK FH=7BFE
rcf102.usc.edu -> almaak.usc.edu TCP D=2049 S=610     Ack=3071280796 Seq=337023348 Len=0 Win=64240
rcf102.usc.edu -> almaak.usc.edu NFS C LOOKUP3 FH=B41B Entries.Log
almaak.usc.edu -> rcf102.usc.edu NFS R LOOKUP3 OK FH=7BFE
rcf102.usc.edu -> almaak.usc.edu TCP D=2049 S=610     Ack=3071281040 Seq=337023500 Len=0 Win=64240
rcf102.usc.edu -> almaak.usc.edu NFS C ACCESS3 FH=7BFE (read,modify,extend,execute)
almaak.usc.edu -> rcf102.usc.edu TCP D=610 S=2049     Ack=337023640 Seq=3071281040 Len=0 Win=64240
almaak.usc.edu -> rcf102.usc.edu NFS R ACCESS3 Stale NFS file handle
rcf102.usc.edu -> almaak.usc.edu NFS C LOOKUP3 FH=B41B Entries.Log
almaak.usc.edu -> rcf102.usc.edu NFS R LOOKUP3 OK FH=7BFE
rcf102.usc.edu -> almaak.usc.edu NFS C LOOKUP3 FH=B41B Entries.Log
almaak.usc.edu -> rcf102.usc.edu NFS R LOOKUP3 OK FH=7BFE

-- 
Garrick Staples, Linux/HPCC Administrator
University of Southern California

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