Stale NFS Filehandles and Permission Denied

[Hugh Caley]

We recently migrated our main storage to a Nexsan Atabeast fronted by 
two PC's running Fedora Core 2.   We are being plagued by  "Stale NFS 
Filehandle" and "Permission Denied" errors on machines mounting the 
shares provided by the two PC's.  Very sporadic, but annoying.

I can't seem to find any rhyme or reason for this.  Clients that have 
seen the problem include a machine running RH 7.3 accessing a mount in 
fstab, to a Fedora Core 1 client automounting a share.  Many times just 
running 'ls' on the share a few times will suddenly make it accessable.  
Other times a umount/mount is required.

The server machines are running Fedora Core 2 and kernel 
2.6.9-1.3_FC2smp.  The exported filesystems are ReiserFS on LVM2 
volumes.  Qlogic QLA2300 fibre adaptors connect the heads to the Nexsan 
Atabeast.

After reading some traffic on the Linux kernel list, I added the 
"no_subtree_check" option to the fstab entries on the servers and 
re-exported.  It doesn't seem to have made much of a difference.

I'm not seeing error messages in /var/log/messages on either the clients 
nor the hosts.

Anyone else seeing this?  Any ideas?  Otherwise the performance on the 
new systems beats the hell out of our old EMC Celerra; the users are 
rather happy with it save for this little problem.

Hugh

-- 
Hugh Caley | Unix Systems Administrator | CIS
AFFYMETRIX, INC. | 6550 Vallejo St. Ste 100 | Emeryville, CA 94608
Tel: 510-428-8537 | Hugh_Caley at affymetrix.com