autofs not mounting from nis maps

autofs not mounting from nis maps

[David]

Hi

I have a NIS server that broadcasts an auto.XXX files as such:

[root@appel2 proc]# ypcat -k auto.master
/home  auto.home
/usr/local  auto.local
/pub auto.pub

[root@appel2 proc]# ypcat -k auto.home | head -8
magnusa  hirst:/homes/hirst/dsk1/&
hattne   hirst:/homes/hirst/dsk2/&
maria  hirst:/homes/hirst/dsk2/&
diane  hirst:/homes/hirst/dsk2/&
alina dqs1:/user13/&
guestji hirst:/homes/hirst/dsk2/&
hanna hirst:/homes/hirst/dsk2/&
gunilla  bacon:/Users/&

...

On the client side roughly half of the directories are actually mounted
when I cd into them, the other half give:
[root@appel2 proc]# cd /home/magnusa
-bash: cd: /home/magnusa: No such file or directory

Without NIS everything works fine. However I have a few tens of
workstations so it's quite tedious to update all machines with new files
and restart autofs whenever something changes.

Am I doing something terribly wrong? Any other tips?

We are running debian on the servers and different Fedora's on the
clients.

-- 
David.
________________________________________________________________________
David van der Spoel, PhD, Assoc. Prof., Molecular Biophysics group,
Dept. of Cell and Molecular Biology, Uppsala University.
Husargatan 3, Box 596,          75124 Uppsala, Sweden
phone:  46 18 471 4205          fax: 46 18 511 755
spoel@xray.bmc.uu.se    spoel@gromacs.org   http://xray.bmc.uu.se/~spoel
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Re: autofs not mounting from nis maps

[Chris Feist]

What version of autofs are you using on the Fedora clients?  rpm -q autofs

Also, what appears in /var/log/messages when the mounts fail?

Thanks,
Chris

David wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I have a NIS server that broadcasts an auto.XXX files as such:
> 
> [root@appel2 proc]# ypcat -k auto.master
> /home  auto.home
> /usr/local  auto.local
> /pub auto.pub
> 
> [root@appel2 proc]# ypcat -k auto.home | head -8
> magnusa  hirst:/homes/hirst/dsk1/&
> hattne   hirst:/homes/hirst/dsk2/&
> maria  hirst:/homes/hirst/dsk2/&
> diane  hirst:/homes/hirst/dsk2/&
> alina dqs1:/user13/&
> guestji hirst:/homes/hirst/dsk2/&
> hanna hirst:/homes/hirst/dsk2/&
> gunilla  bacon:/Users/&
> 
> ...
> 
> On the client side roughly half of the directories are actually mounted
> when I cd into them, the other half give:
> [root@appel2 proc]# cd /home/magnusa
> -bash: cd: /home/magnusa: No such file or directory
> 
> Without NIS everything works fine. However I have a few tens of
> workstations so it's quite tedious to update all machines with new files
> and restart autofs whenever something changes.
> 
> Am I doing something terribly wrong? Any other tips?
> 
> We are running debian on the servers and different Fedora's on the
> clients.
> 

Re: autofs not mounting from nis maps

[Jim Carter]

On Wed, 16 Mar 2005, David wrote:
> [root@appel2 proc]# ypcat -k auto.master
> /home  auto.home
--- snip ---
> [root@appel2 proc]# ypcat -k auto.home | head -8
> magnusa  hirst:/homes/hirst/dsk1/&

We do almost exactly the same thing, except our auto.home map includes the
full path name, i.e.
	prob-mp sonia:/h1/guest/prob-mp
rather than using the &.  But I'm sure this is not your problem.  I 
explicitly specify the map type in /etc/auto.master, i.e. 
	/home           yp:auto.home
but again, I doubt that has anything to do with your problem.

We're using autofs-4.1.3; what version are you using?  

Since automounting works perfectly if it's a file map, I'm inclined to 
blame YP and not look at either NFS mounting or autofs.  (Do log files 
suggest that I'm wrong here?)

Is it always the same users whose homedirs fail to mount?  Or will Mangusa 
mount one day and not the next?  Do all the workstations behave equally?  I 
assume both servers have some failing users.  Does the failure rate vary 
with the time of day or with obvious system activities like backups?  I 
know that our YP wierds out at 2 AM when the backups kick off, because the 
network is overloaded.

YP relies on UDP.  If there were network problems that ate YP packets 
intermittently, it would explain the problem.  If a workstation pings the 
YP server host (at a time of day when automount failures are seen), what's 
the packet loss rate?  Is there any other reason to suspect flakiness in 
the YP server and/or client?  Suppose you do "ypmatch $user auto.home", 
iterating over and over through all your users, do you see any failures?
(We don't, except during backups.)

Good luck; I hope this helps.

James F. Carter          Voice 310 825 2897    FAX 310 206 6673
UCLA-Mathnet;  6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA 90095-1555
Email: jimc@math.ucla.edu  http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc (q.v. for PGP key)

Re: autofs not mounting from nis maps

[David]

On Wed, 2005-03-16 at 15:31 -0800, Jim Carter wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Mar 2005, David wrote:
> > [root@appel2 proc]# ypcat -k auto.master
> > /home  auto.home
> --- snip ---
> > [root@appel2 proc]# ypcat -k auto.home | head -8
> > magnusa  hirst:/homes/hirst/dsk1/&
> 
> We do almost exactly the same thing, except our auto.home map includes the
> full path name, i.e.
> 	prob-mp sonia:/h1/guest/prob-mp
> rather than using the &.  But I'm sure this is not your problem.  I 
> explicitly specify the map type in /etc/auto.master, i.e. 
> 	/home           yp:auto.home
> but again, I doubt that has anything to do with your problem.

Neither of these helped, and indeed nothing I found on the net seemed to
have any impact.

> 
> We're using autofs-4.1.3; what version are you using?  
4.1.2 and 4.1.3 depending on Fedora installation.

> 
> Since automounting works perfectly if it's a file map, I'm inclined to 
> blame YP and not look at either NFS mounting or autofs.  (Do log files 
> suggest that I'm wrong here?)
Log files say hardly anything, even when automaount is started with -v
and or -d.

My guess is that autofs misinterprets the YP maps in some way. Could it
be something with spaces versus tabs in the map files?


> 
> Is it always the same users whose homedirs fail to mount?  Or will Mangusa 
> mount one day and not the next?  Do all the workstations behave equally?  I 
> assume both servers have some failing users.  Does the failure rate vary 
> with the time of day or with obvious system activities like backups?  I 
> know that our YP wierds out at 2 AM when the backups kick off, because the 
> network is overloaded.

No it's consistently the same failure and also for different autofs
versions. The auto.home map contains little over 100 entries with 10

> 
> YP relies on UDP.  If there were network problems that ate YP packets 
> intermittently, it would explain the problem.  If a workstation pings the 
> YP server host (at a time of day when automount failures are seen), what's 
> the packet loss rate?  Is there any other reason to suspect flakiness in 
> the YP server and/or client?  Suppose you do "ypmatch $user auto.home", 
> iterating over and over through all your users, do you see any failures?
> (We don't, except during backups.)
The following simple script showed me that 57 out of 105 entries in the
auto.home file actually are not matched, indicating that this is indeed
a YP problem. Are there some cached YP files somewhere? Restarting yp
did not help.

#!/bin/csh -f

foreach user ( `ypcat -k auto.home | awk '{ print $1 }'` )
  ypmatch -k $user auto.home
end


-- 
David.
________________________________________________________________________
David van der Spoel, PhD, Assoc. Prof., Molecular Biophysics group,
Dept. of Cell and Molecular Biology, Uppsala University.
Husargatan 3, Box 596,          75124 Uppsala, Sweden
phone:  46 18 471 4205          fax: 46 18 511 755
spoel@xray.bmc.uu.se    spoel@gromacs.org   http://xray.bmc.uu.se/~spoel
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Re: autofs not mounting from nis maps

[David]

On Wed, 2005-03-16 at 15:31 -0800, Jim Carter wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Mar 2005, David wrote:
> > [root@appel2 proc]# ypcat -k auto.master
> > /home  auto.home
> --- snip ---
> > [root@appel2 proc]# ypcat -k auto.home | head -8
> > magnusa  hirst:/homes/hirst/dsk1/&
> 
> We do almost exactly the same thing, except our auto.home map includes the
> full path name, i.e.
> 	prob-mp sonia:/h1/guest/prob-mp
> rather than using the &.  But I'm sure this is not your problem.  I 
> explicitly specify the map type in /etc/auto.master, i.e. 
> 	/home           yp:auto.home
> but again, I doubt that has anything to do with your problem.

OK, found it. 
There were spaces instead of tabs between key and value. Apparently NIS
chokes on that.

Now it works.



-- 
David.
________________________________________________________________________
David van der Spoel, PhD, Assoc. Prof., Molecular Biophysics group,
Dept. of Cell and Molecular Biology, Uppsala University.
Husargatan 3, Box 596,          75124 Uppsala, Sweden
phone:  46 18 471 4205          fax: 46 18 511 755
spoel@xray.bmc.uu.se    spoel@gromacs.org   http://xray.bmc.uu.se/~spoel
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Re: autofs not mounting from nis maps

[Michael Blandford]

David wrote:

>On Wed, 2005-03-16 at 15:31 -0800, Jim Carter wrote:
>  
>
>>On Wed, 16 Mar 2005, David wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>[root@appel2 proc]# ypcat -k auto.master
>>>/home  auto.home
>>>      
>>>
>>--- snip ---
>>    
>>
>>>[root@appel2 proc]# ypcat -k auto.home | head -8
>>>magnusa  hirst:/homes/hirst/dsk1/&
>>>      
>>>
>>We do almost exactly the same thing, except our auto.home map includes the
>>full path name, i.e.
>>	prob-mp sonia:/h1/guest/prob-mp
>>rather than using the &.  But I'm sure this is not your problem.  I 
>>explicitly specify the map type in /etc/auto.master, i.e. 
>>	/home           yp:auto.home
>>but again, I doubt that has anything to do with your problem.
>>    
>>
>
>OK, found it. 
>There were spaces instead of tabs between key and value. Apparently NIS
>chokes on that.
>
>Now it works.
>
>
>  
>


I didn't read this whole thread soI missed what version you were running. 

Many tabs/spaces bugs have been fixed in the 4.1.x tree. 

Michael