Automount oddities: trying to mount strange directories

[Reuben D. Budiardja]

Hello,
In my LAN I have a server in which all the /home for users reside. The /home 
is shared via NFS. The server also as a NIS server. 
Other machines in the LAN mount the /home from the server, using automount. 
Here is /etc/auto.master:
/home /etc/auto.home

and /etc/auto.home:
* -rw,intr,soft,timeo=300,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768      server1:/home/&

Yesterday, on a desktop that I use, I noticed a high disk activity on the 
machine. Checking out the /var/log/messages, I found something like the 
following repeated over and over again until the log file got big (~10 MB):
...
Jan 25 08:23:08 desktop1 automount[4153]: failed to mount /home/tls
Jan 25 08:23:08 desktop1 automount[4159]: >> mount: server1:/home/.directory 
failed, reason given by server: Permission denied
Jan 25 08:23:08 desktop1 automount[4159]: mount(nfs): nfs: mount failure 
server1:/home/.directory on /home/.directory  
Jan 25 08:23:08 desktop1 automount[4159]: failed to mount /home/.directory
Jan 25 08:23:08 desktop1 automount[4161]: >> mount: server1:/home/tls failed, 
reason given by server: Permission denied
Jan 25 08:23:08 desktop1 automount[4161]: mount(nfs): nfs: mount failure 
server1:/home/tls on /home/tls
Jan 25 08:23:08 desktop1 automount[4161]: failed to mount /home/tls
Jan 25 08:23:08 desktop1 automount[4158]: >> mount: server1:/home/--timeout=60 
failed, reason given by server: Permission denied
Jan 25 08:23:08 desktop1 automount[4158]: mount(nfs): nfs: mount failure 
server1:/home/--timeout=60 on /home/--timeout=60
Jan 25 08:23:08 desktop1 automount[4158]: failed to mount /home/--timeout=60
...

So correspondingly on the server side, I got something like:

...
Jan 25 08:23:08 server1 rpc.mountd: refused mount request from 
desktop1.localdomain for /home/.directory (/home): illegal port 35326
Jan 25 08:23:08 server1 rpc.mountd: refused mount request from 
desktop1.localdomain for /home/tls (/home): illegal port 35327
Jan 25 08:23:08 server1 rpc.mountd: refused mount request from 
desktop1.localdomain for /home/--timeout=60 (/home): illegal port 35328
Jan 25 08:23:08 server1 rpc.mountd: authenticated mount request from 
desktop1.localdomain:902 for /home/.directory (/home)   
Jan 25 08:23:08 server1 rpc.mountd: can't stat exported dir /home/.directory: 
No such file or directory
Jan 25 08:23:08 server1 rpc.mountd: refused mount request from 
desktop1.localdomain for /home/--timeout=60 (/home): illegal port 35329
...
and also:
...
Jan 25 08:23:08 server1 rpc.mountd: can't stat exported dir /home/.directory: 
No such file or directory
Jan 25 08:23:08 server1 rpc.mountd: authenticated mount request from 
desktop1.localdomain:804 for /home/--timeout=60 (/home) 
Jan 25 08:23:08 server1 rpc.mountd: can't stat exported 
dir /home/--timeout=60: No such file or directory
Jan 25 08:23:09 server1 rpc.mountd: authenticated mount request from 
desktop1.localdomain:816 for /home/tls (/home)
Jan 25 08:23:09 server1 rpc.mountd: can't stat exported dir /home/tls: No such 
file or directory
...
which makes sense because those directories dont exist. 

When that happens, I tried to find the process which might cause it, but I 
could not find anything odd. I closed all running application and basically 
and it was still happening until I finally rebooted the desktop.

Yesterday was the second time something like that happened. The first time it 
happened I decided that it probably was just a fluke of something random went 
wrong. But since it happened more than once, I got really curious. 

So any help on figuring this out will be appreciated. 

Thanks in advance
RDB
-- 
Reuben D. Budiardja
Dept. Physics and Astronomy
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN

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