Problems with RHEL 5 server: NFS related?

[Kenneth Holter]

Hello list.


We experienced some problems with one of our RHEL 5 servers, but are having
difficulties finding the cause. Before we got the chance to gather enough
information I had to reboot the server, and are left with little information
about the state before reboot. For what it's worth I'll outline the symptoms
we saw, just in case someone has experienced a similar thing and knows
something what may have caused these problems.

The symptoms we saw were these:

   1. Running "ls" a particular folder gave us an input/output error. This
   folder is exported read only as an NFS share, and was mounted on a client.
   2. Running "/etc/init.d/nfs stop" resulted in a error containing
   "Shutting down NFS services:  exportfs: could not open /var/lib/nfs/etab for
   locking" and "rm: cannot remove `/var/lock/subsys/nfs': Read-only file
   system"
   3. Both the Red Hat Satellite probe and syslog (an possibly others) had
   stopped working at approximately the same time.

First we thought the problems had something to do with NFS because of the
first two elements in the list above. But we don't see why a read only share
would case such problems. And the syslog/probe issues doesn't seem to be
related to NFS. Furthermore, we don't see any indication of file system or
hardware problems.

In short, we're not sure what exactly caused these problems, but a restart
seems to have done the trick. And since we didn't get to gather much info,
it's very difficult to get to the bottom of this. But does anyone have an
idea on what kind of problem source may cause the symptoms described above?
Maybe this is a well known bug of some kind.

Please ask me for further details if needed.


Regards,
Kenneth Holter