komarnit@tramp.colorado.edu (KOMARNITSKY ALEK O) (04/02/91)
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@tramp.colorado.edu P.S. Except for a few hiccups like this, the automounter is great!