NFS bogons?

[Mike Khaw]

Does the following scenario trigger any bells with anyone? ...

All 3 Sun3-s involved in this scenario are at SunOS 4.0.

I use the NN newsreader from a diskless NFS client (Openwindows 2.0 beta).
NN runs as an NNTP client, and is NOT suid or sgid anything.

The NNTP server is another Sun3, but it is not an NFS citizen; i.e., it
doesn't mount from any NFS servers and doesn't export any of its local
filesystems over NFS.

NN uses a set of files that reside on yet another Sun3, this one being an
NFS server, to keep things up to date. I own all those files.

Everything had been working great for many months, until suddenly today I
could no longer read new news with NN. After a lot of poking around, I
discovered that there was a set of temporary files created by NN that I
owned but couldn't rm -- either from my machine or WHILE LOGGED ONTO THE
NFS SERVER where those files resided. I also couldn't mv them, or cp
/dev/null over them.

Finally, I managed to get rid of them by creating a new empty file in the
same directory, and them mv-ing that file over each of the undead files in
turn, and then rm-ing it at the end. After that NN was fine again!

Does this sound familiar to anyone that you can occasionally get files on
and NFS server that are difficult to destroy even from the server?  Is it
fixed in SunOS 4.1?

Mike Khaw
ParcPlace Systems, Inc., 1550 Plymouth St., Mountain View, CA 94043
Domain=khaw at parcplace.com, UUCP=...!{uunet,sun,decwrl}!parcplace!khaw