Re: Very strange autofs failure on 2.6.30-rc2 with autofs-5.0.3-41 (fc10)

[Ian Kent <raven@themaw.net>]

Ian Kent wrote:
> H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>> I have been using for a very long time a setup where /home is an autofs 
>> from a plain indirect NIS map, but my personal home directory 
>> (/home/hpa) is simply a bind mount from /export/home/hpa.  A 
>> straightforward use of autofs.
>>
>> I just rebooted my system yesterday, however, and found that all the 
>> directory entries in my home directory had gotten replaced with ghost 
>> directories -- and even more confusingly, the date wasn't the current 
>> date, but was back in 2008.
>>
>> The ghost directories were "sterile" in the sense that entering them 
>> wouldn't show the proper contents of those directories.  As a result, 
>> massive failure.
>>
>> After suspecting filesystem corruption, and this, that and the other 
>> thing, I found that this was only when viewing though autofs 
>> (/home/hpa), and that the real filesystem (/export/home/hpa) was fully 
>> intact.  Somehow autofs had ended up ghosting pretty much my entire 
>> directory, and doing so in some incorrect fashion.
>>
>> Replacing /home with a plain bind mount (no autofs) to /export/home 
>> resolved the issue.
> 
> This failure sounds rather more spectacular than should result from a
> known problem we have with a recent init scripts change. I'll investigate.
> 
> Have a look at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=475002.

I built 2.6.30-rc2, installed it on F-10 and it worked OK for me with a
simple indirect map as you described. I also ran through the autofs
Connectathon test suite I use several times without seeing a problem.

Can you post the map your using and (although it's probabbly too late
now) a debug log of the event. Jeff Moyer has some information about
version 5 debug logging setup at http://people.redhat.com/jmoyer.

Ian