NFS automounts hang

automountmountnfsnis

I have been mounting NFS shares on my x86 Ubuntu with NIS/am-utils fine for a long time, but today my system got into a state where it could no longer access automounted directories and instead frequently got hung up trying to access them, returning either "Input/output error" or "Permission denied" (almost randomly), as well as "stale file handle." I can, however, manually mount that share fine. Restarting am-utils doesn't help get my system out of its funk; is there any other way of getting my system un-stuck?

Best Answer

 umount -f -l

always works for me on hung nfs mounts.

Related Solutions

Force NFS automounts to use NFSv3

In /etc/sysconfig/autofs, change the MOUNT_NFS_DEFAULT_PROTOCOL variable.

# MOUNT_NFS_DEFAULT_PROTOCOL - specify the default protocol used by
#                              mount.nfs(8). Since we can't identify
#                              the default automatically we need to
#                              set it in our configuration. This will
#                              only make a difference for replicated
#                              map entries as availability probing isn't
#                              used for single host map entries.
#
#MOUNT_NFS_DEFAULT_PROTOCOL=3
MOUNT_NFS_DEFAULT_PROTOCOL=4

NFS share suddenly becomes unresponsive

In my experience. NFS is notorious for problems like this. Could it be related to a problem with your network switch?

Do the web server and mail server access the same NFS server? if not, try moving the NFS server for your email to a different network port and see if that helps.

Otherwise try some of these options in your fstab file. increase the timeouts. Set the soft option. You might also like to try the fsc (filesystem cache) option. I'm hoping that it will cache the write operation and solve your problem.

See: http://linux.die.net/man/5/nfs

On a side note, your web server is mostly reading. Your mail server is mostly performing writes.

If all that fails, I'd consider ditching nfs and using iSCSI instead.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Force NFS automounts to use NFSv3

NFS share suddenly becomes unresponsive

Related Topic