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From: G.Eustace@massey.ac.nz (Glen Eustace)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.nfs
Subject: perculiar NFS behaviour
Message-ID: <1991Apr15.045511.6354@massey.ac.nz>
Date: 15 Apr 91 04:55:11 GMT
Organization: Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
Lines: 48
X-Reader: NETNEWS/PC Version 2.1

The following saga is from our Tales of Mystery and Imagination....

Actually it happened this afternoon and after having consulted as
many individuals as possible, all are at a loss to explain the
following behaviour.  I am hoping that someone else has observed this
behaviour and if they don't have a cure may at least have an
explanation.

Environment:
  Pyramid 9815 OSx5.0d
     All user file systems have quotas enabled
     All nfs user file systems are mounted without quotas
  DECStation 3100s Ultrix 4.1
     All user file systems have quotas enabled
     All nfs user file systems are mounted without quotas

  All user file systems are cross mounted hard on all servers.

What happened.
  One of the DECStations developed a fault and died.  the /users/u12
file system was now offline.  This file system could not be
dismounted from the Pyramid.  We don't have this problem with Ultrix,
if the host is unreachable the unmount reports the problem but
succeeds in unmounting the file system anyway.

  I was attempting to archive some files from one of the Pyramids
local file systems /users/u5.  The 'find' was getting stuck on a 'D'
wait, it would come up with cc-labserver2:/users/u12 not responding...
and would eventually timeout with a getattr failure.  We tried 'ls',
it succeeded sometimes but failed with the same error on others.
Note that we were working completely within the local machine.  Why
is the Pyramid trying to access a remote file system in this
situation?

In addition to the above the login process is very slow.  It would
appear that login is trying to check quotas on the faulty machine.
Why?  we have not mounted its file system with quotas.

All in all the only way to fix this was to reboot the pyramid.  Not a
solution I like but it did work.  I am perplexed with why such a simple
command like 'ls' or 'find' on a local file system should cause a
'getattr' call on an entirely different remote file system.

-- 
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Glen Eustace, Systems Software Manager | EMail: G.Eustace@massey.ac.nz
 Computer Centre,  Massey University,  Palmerston North,  New Zealand
Phone: +64 63 69099 x7440, Fax: +64 63 505 607,       Timezone: GMT-12