Stale filehandles again

From: Damian Menscher (menscher+linux_at_uiuc.edu)
Date: 09/29/05


Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 23:53:12 +0000 (UTC)

I thought I understood stale NFS filehandles: if you change the server
filesystem (eg. by copying files to a new drive) then your filehandles
will all change and you'll get stale filehandles. But I just had a
case where I had some stale filehandles without changing the server
filesystem, and I'm curious why.

The server and clients are all running CentOS 4.1 (a recompile of
RedHat Enterprise 4.1). I have several filesystems exported from the
server to the clients. When the server died last night (bug in lvm2
snapshots) the clients all (same behavior) were able to recover most
of the filesystems, but got stale filehandles on two of them. The
only thing similar about the two that failed is that they're rarely
(if ever) used by the users.

Given that fsck shouldn't screw with inode numbers or the filesystem
UUID or generation number, I'm really curious what happened to cause
two of the filesystems to break in this case. Any thoughts?

Damian Menscher

-- 
-=#| Physics Grad Student & SysAdmin @ U Illinois Urbana-Champaign |#=-
-=#| 488 LLP, 1110 W. Green St, Urbana, IL 61801 Ofc:(217)333-0038 |#=-
-=#| 4602 Beckman, VMIL/MS, Imaging Technology Group:(217)244-3074 |#=-
-=#| <menscher@uiuc.edu> www.uiuc.edu/~menscher/ Fax:(217)333-9819 |#=-
-=#| The above opinions are not necessarily those of my employers. |#=-


Relevant Pages

  • Re: Stale filehandles again
    ... >I thought I understood stale NFS filehandles: if you change the server ... >will all change and you'll get stale filehandles. ... >filesystem, and I'm curious why. ...
    (comp.protocols.nfs)
  • Re: Stale filehandles again
    ... >>I thought I understood stale NFS filehandles: if you change the server ... >>will all change and you'll get stale filehandles. ... >>filesystem, and I'm curious why. ...
    (comp.protocols.nfs)
  • Re: CIFS / Kerberos question
    ... Packet sniffing from a connected hub (for server, ... > I am trying to achieve PKI authentication and SMB access to Windows ... > - Filesystem relies on SSPI-KerberosV to provide security services. ... What exactly does Kerberos do in the server? ...
    (microsoft.public.win2000.security)
  • Re: OT: why no file copy() libc/syscall ??
    ... the mounted filesystem. ... message over the network directly to the server. ... > the remote server implementing the file copy. ...
    (Linux-Kernel)
  • Re: [PATCH] VFS: new fgetattr() file operation
    ... We need this because fstat() semantics can in some cases be better ... implemented if the filesystem has the open file available. ... the server implemented as an unprivileged userspace process running on ... fstatis performed on open file descriptor on client ...
    (Linux-Kernel)