Re: rpc.mountd crashes when extensively using netgroups

["J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@fieldses.org>]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 02:55:14PM +0200, Stefan Walter wrote:
> There are however two issues for which we could not find an easy
> solution:
> 
>  1. For every client rpc.mountd and the kernel seem to exchange
>     and use lists with _all_ netgroups used in exports that are
>     relevant for granting permission to some share for a particular
>     client. We could imagine two optimizations here:
> 
>        * Resolve netgroups and only put the (member) netgroups that
>          contained the host name that would be used to authorize
>          a mount in the list.
> 
>        * Use the list of mounted paths per client and only put the
>          netgroup(s) used to export paths that are actually mounted
>          on a client. 
> 
>     This also caused us severe performance problems because
>     rpc.mountd queries all these netgroups. We were initially using
>     a LDAP and mouting a directory took up to ten seconds
>     during which rpc.mountd was busily querying the LDAP server.
>     We got this down to two seconds using file based netgroups.
>  
>  2. Using a fixed size for NFSCLNT_IDMAX does not scale. Mounting
>     shares on a client for which the 'if' clause of the quick fix
>     becomes true will not be possible. We thought about enlarging
>     NFSCLNT_IDMAX and using a custom kernel but dropped the idea. 
> 
> Our ultimate goal is to get Red Hat fix the code in nfs-utils 1.0.6
> that is used in RHEL4. A first step would be to get a suitable fix in
> the current nfs-utils. 

That's an interesting problem.  Thanks for the report!

I don't believe that long comma-delimited string actually has any
meaning to the kernel--as far as the kernel is concerned, it's just an
opaque object that will be passed back to mountd later (along with a
path name) to get export options.

So I suppose that string could be replaced by a hash, or maybe even just
by the ip address of the particular host--the disadvantage to the latter
being that it would require the kernel to keep a separate export for
each client address.

--b.