"stale NFS file handle" problem

[David Jansen]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 10:10:44PM +0000, 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.
> 
> Anne

I have had a lot of nfs instability lately, including the stale nfs file
handles. The latest update that came out a couple of days ago, seems to
have fixed this, nfs-utils-1.1.4-7.fc10 . Only, if nfs was already
messed up on a server, only a reboot seems to help, as far as I have
been able to figure out.
So first upgrade to the latest nfs-utils, see if a 'service nfs restart'
is succesful, and if not, try rebooting. It got things going for me on a
lot of systems (like a 32 node cluster used for computations, where each
of the nodes needs to see the disks of the other nodes, so lots of
cross-mounts, and lots of heavy data access. so if there stil was a bug,
I guess I would have noticed it there).

David Jansen