"stale NFS file handle" problem

[Adam Hough]

On Wed, 2009-01-28 at 22:36 +0000, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Wednesday 28 January 2009 22:10:44 Anne Wilson wrote:
> > Both my F10 netbook and Mandriva 2009 laptop have nfs mounts to my home
> > directory and a data directory on my server.  A couple of hours ago I found
> > that I could not access the home directory, although the data directory is
> > still fine.  I was seeing messages about "stale NFS file handle".  On
> > googling I got the impression that the problem was at the client end, but
> > it would be really strange if both clients developed a problem at the same
> > time.
> >
> > I've really no idea where to look, to troubleshoot this.  All ideas
> > welcome.
> >
> I wonder if there is any connection with the fact that I had to reinstall 
> CentOS on the server yesterday, as repeated power-cuts had depleted the ups 
> until the system was trashed.  Most things are up and running again, but there 
> is a problem with keychain, which I still have to resolve.  The permissions on 
> the data directory are much looser (since it is shared with other users) so it 
> could be an authentication problem.  I'll be looking into the keychain issue 
> tomorrow.
> 
> Anne

Checkout adding fsid=XXX in your NFS server's /etc/exports file to the
exported directories.  It helps nfs clients recover from NFS servers
dropping out on them and then coming back later.  You will need centos5
or newer kernel/nfs software stack for this option to help though.

- Adam