rhosts files vs. OS 3.4

[Glenn Little]

We are having a strange problem here with some of our users' NFS served
home directories.  The problem is that every few hours or so, a couple
users' .rhosts files become unreadable.  So far, it's always been the same
two users.  The symptoms of unreadability:

  % more .rhosts
  %

  % cat .rhosts
  cat: read error: Permission denied
  %

  % file .rhosts
  .rhosts:        ascii text
  %

  % ls -l .rhosts
  -rw-------  1 joe_user       561 Mar 29 12:11 .rhosts
  %

  % od -c .rhosts
  0000000
  %

  % touch .rhosts
  % cat .rhosts
  cat: read error: Permission denied
  %


##### ...and the cure... ######

  % touch xyzzy  (where xyzzy is a previously non-existent file)
  % cat .rhosts
  another_client joe_user


The symptoms and cure happen on a client by client basis... that is if the
problem is fixed on one client, it may still appear on another until it is
fixed there as well.  And the cure usually only lasts for a few hours.
The two users are both in a common netgroup, but other users in that
netgroup do not have this problem.

  The server is a sun 3/280
  The clients are sun 3/50s

Does anyone have any ideas about this?   Thanks for any help.

		Glenn Little
		little%cs at ucsd.edu