Re: nfs client: Now you see it, now you don't (aka spurious ESTALE errors)

[Bruce Guenter <bruce@untroubled.org>]

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On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 10:59:37AM -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 05:05:26PM +0000, Larry Keegan wrote:
> > On Thu, 25 Jul 2013 10:11:43 -0400
> > Jeff Layton <jlayton@redhat.com> wrote:
> > > On Thu, 25 Jul 2013 13:45:15 +0000
> > > Larry Keegan <lk@pfw.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > The problem I am seeing is that for the past month or so, on and
> > > > off, one NFS client starts reporting stale NFS file handles on some
> > > > part of the directory tree exported by the NFS server. During the
> > > > outage the other parts of the same export remain unaffected.
> 
> And the problem affects just that one directory?  Ohter files and
> directories on the same filesystem continue to be accessible?

FWIW I have also experienced the same problem. Randomly, some part of a
NFS (v4) mounted directory tree start return ESTALE, while the rest of
the tree remains accessable.

I am currently running linux 3.9.7 on the server, and have experienced
the problem on clients running linux 3.8.11 and 3.10. The underlying
filesystem is ext4 on dm-crypt.

Unlike the OP, I have not seen the behavior go away after a period of
time, although perhaps I didn't wait long enough. The only fix I found
is to unmount and re-mount (which gets to be a nuisance when ones' home
directory is NFS mounted).

FWIW During the most recent failure, I straced ls and noticed that the
stat on the failing directory works, but opening it failed. I don't know
if that's significant, but I didn't see it mentioned before.

-- 
Bruce Guenter <bruce@untroubled.org>                http://untroubled.org/

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