Problems using the automounter on exported symlink'ed files
KOMARNITSKY ALEK O
komarnit at tramp.colorado.edu
Wed Apr 3 01:00:00 AEST 1991
I ran across an interesting problem the other day that may interest some
of you (or you may say what a doof! :-).
We use the automounter extensively in our multi-vendor network. However,
all of the above just happened on the Sun's - as a matter of fact, the
public domain amd program didn't have this problem.
Filesystem /foo on "mach1" is on a seperate disk and exported. I recently
moved /foo to a "mach2", but did not want to break user's scripts (some
use hard-coded machines names in the path), so I added a symlink from
mach1:/foo -> /nfs/mach2/users/foo. I made no other changes (in
hindsight, should have unexported mach1:/foo).
Everything worked OK in the network, until someone made a reference to
/nfs/mach1/foo. At that time, the user's window froze (even the clock),
and the load factor started climbing (reached 10+ on a SS2). Any other
references to /nfs/* locked up that session. Normal users rlogin'in never
received the login prompt (probably due to the fact that there home
directory was /nfs/"hostname"/...). However, root was able to login. Kill
& kill -9 AND shutdown to single-user mode failed to halt the automounter,
so a reboot was required. Note that the mount command DID work.
Of course, a myrid of other factors were going on that obscured this
problem, so it took a few hours to isloate this as the problem.
Bottom line: Looks like you shouldn't export a filesystem that a symlink
to another automounted filesystem (sure, one would never WANT do this, but
I think you can understand why I did it above).
Alek Komarnitsky
komarnit at tramp.colorado.edu
P.S. Except for a few hiccups like this, the automounter is great!
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