Problems with Stale File Handles as non-root user

Problems with Stale File Handles as non-root user

[Campbell McLeay]

Hi,

I have a directory that is mounted via NFS over a 100 Base-T LAN
and it gets 'Stale NFS File handle' errors after short periods of
inactivity (say, a few minutes) For instance, commands such as 'ls' in the 
nfs-mounted directory return the stale file handle error after a couple of minutes
idle time. Any operation attempting to read/write to the directory fails with the
same error when the user is non-root.

Interestingly, this only happens with non-root users: when logged
in as root, no errors occur.

The nfs server is running Debian/GNU potato Linux with 2.4.18 kernel
with v3 support compiled in (although I can only get it to
do v2) and the client is running the same but with a 2.2.19 kernel. I have
tried remounting it as v3 but the server does not appear to 
be able to do this (I can't use '-N 1 -N 2' with mountd as suggested in the FAQ).

AFAIK, there is no known network issue with the LAN (it works fine as root always in any case).
The versions of nfs-server and nfs-common on each machine are the latest debian
versions (i.e., 2.2beta47-4potato for the server and 0.1.9.1-1.potato for 
nfs-common. The version of mount is 2.10f-5.1). 


Any ideas on how to solve this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Campbell


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Re: Problems with Stale File Handles as non-root user

[Trond Myklebust]

>>>>> " " == Campbell McLeay <campbellm@cia.net.au> writes:

     > AFAIK, there is no known network issue with the LAN (it works
     > fine as root always in any case).  The versions of nfs-server
     > and nfs-common on each machine are the latest debian versions
     > (i.e., 2.2beta47-4potato for the server and 0.1.9.1-1.potato
     > for nfs-common. The version of mount is 2.10f-5.1).


     > Any ideas on how to solve this problem would be greatly
     > appreciated.

Use knfsd instead of nfs-server. The userland nfs-server does not have
a reliable method for manipulating filehandles. In particular if the
filehandle falls out of the server's internal cache then it is not
always capable of recovering.

Cheers,
  Trond


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