NFS out of sync

[Zhou, Jingchen]

We have a NFS server (running RHEL4) to support a large number of client workstations (running RHEL4). The clients are all identical (in term of hardware, OS, system configuration and etc), and have /usr/local mounted from the NFS server. /etc/fstab is configured identically on all clients as such:
masterfs:/usr/local       /usr/local      nfs     defaults        0 0

For some reason, one client's /usr/local is out of sync with the rest of clients (both files and the time stamps). For example:

On one client that is out of sync:

$ ls -all /usr/local/lcls/tools/edm/display/bpms
-rwxr-xr-x   1 softegr lcls 31991 Jul 25  2007 bpm_stripline_diagnostic.edl

On all others :

$ ls -all /usr/local/lcls/tools/edm/display/bpms
-rw-rw-r--   1 softegr  lcls 31991 Jan 16 16:27 bpm_stripline_diagnostic.edl
drwxrwxr-x   2 softegr  lcls  4096 Jan 30 09:49 CVS


As you can see,  file bpm_stripline_diagnostic.edl is not updated on one client and  file CVS is not showing up.


What is going on here? I would certainly expect that /usr/local should be transparent and in sync on all clients. But this dir on one client is clearly out of sync for quite long and doesn't know how to sync back with the rest automatically. I have to reboot the client to clear the problem when that happens. By the way, all clinets have NTP set correctly.

Is there anyway to prevent this happen? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much,
Jingchen