gam_server trying to access non-existence files in /home

[Justin Willmert]

Reuben D. Budiardja wrote:
> 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. The server is running 
> Centos 4.1. 
> Other machines (including my desktop) 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/&
>
> Sometimes ago, and this has been happening since, I noticed some oddities in 
> my NFS server. In fact I asked the list about it but got no respond. 
> Basically the problem was my NFS server has been getting lots of hits by 
> mount request from my desktop, for non existence files. The log of the NFS 
> server showes, for example:
>
> Mar 25 14:48:00 server1 rpc.mountd: authenticated mount request from 
> desktop1.localdomain:769 for /home/format (/home)
> Mar 25 14:48:00 server1 rpc.mountd: can't stat exported dir /home/format: No 
> such file or directory
> Mar 25 14:48:01 server1 rpc.mountd: authenticated mount request from 
> desktop1.localdomain:773 for /home/format (/home)
> Mar 25 14:48:01 server1 rpc.mountd: can't stat exported dir /home/format: No 
> such file or directory
>
> My desktop is running FC4. It turns out that this is caused by a process 
> called gam_server. Once in a while, after opening some application, (eg. 
> GIMP, but it could be anything else), I would notice increased disk 
> activities on the desktop while nothing obvious is happening. Then if I check 
> my /var/log/message and the /var/log/message of the NFS server, I see the NFS 
> requests hitting the server as I mentioned above. When I kill the gam_server 
> process, everything would be fine again, and gam_server restarts itself with 
> different PID. 
>
> This has been happening intermitently. I've done some searching but all I 
> could come up was that gam_server is somekind of a file monitoring server. 
> There had been bug reports on bugzilla.redhat.com (againts FC 3, IIRC) that 
> gam_server was eating up CPU. I am not sure if that's related to this at all.
>
> So I am wondering if anyone experienced something like this or know anything 
> more about gam_server. I'm wondering also if this is some sort of a bug in 
> the gam_server itself, or if it's my configuration problem. Any help on my 
> understanding about gam_server (what is gam_server really for ?) would also 
> be appreciated.
>
> For reference, my earlier post about this problem that I mentioned above is 
> here: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=fedora-list&m=113827738925694&w=2
>
> Thank you for any help.
> RDB
>   
Just to add a tidbit I have problems with is when I logout of my user 
(and even if I switch to runlevel 3), gam_server runs in the background 
under my user name with open files to my home directory. My home is also 
shared through NFS, so I have to kill the process manually before I can 
unmount /home. Maybe this is a normal thing (I haven't really looked 
around for an answer), but seeing this I thought I'd just add this.

Justin Willmert