Re: [PATCH] Don't hang user processes if Kerberos ticket for nfs4mount expires

[John Hughes]

On 16/11/11 20:47, Jeff Layton wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Nov 2011 19:14:35 +0100
> John Hughes<john@xxxxxxxxxxxx>  wrote:
>
> > With recent kernels if the Kerberos ticket for a nfs4 mount expires any
> > user process trying to access the mount hangs until a new ticket is
> > obtained.  Simultaneously a (luckily rate-limited, but still seemingly
> > endless) stream of "Error: state manager encountered RPCSEC_GSS session
> > expired against NFSv4 server" messages is written to the kernel log.
[...]
> > This patch restores the old behavior, which makes nfs4 mounted home
> > directories usable for me.
> Uhhh, no...EKEYEXPIRED was never passed to userland. The patchset that
> added EKEYEXPIRED returns in this codepath also added the code to make
> it hang.

You are, of course, right.  userland used to get EPERM.

> This not a bug, or at least it's intentional behavior. When a krb5
> ticket expires, we *want* the process to hang. Otherwise, people with
> long running jobs will often find that their jobs error out
> inexplicably when their ticket expires.
I thought that was what kstart/krenew were for.
> The patches that introduced this behavior went into 2.6.34. See the
> commits around 2c64348 (and some preceding ones in the rpc layer).

Ah, I'm a Debian user - 2.6.32 for the moment, soon to be 3.?

> If you want to fix this use case, you'll need to come up with a scheme
> that doesn't regress this behavior. I think that you'll really need to
> ensure that whatever process you expect to re-fetch your TGT is not
> dependent on accessing kerberized nfs mounts. That really seems like an
> untenable chicken and egg situation.

Ow.  "Fixing" (at least) Gnome-3 and Gnome-2 screen-lock/screensavers.

How about a mount option to chose between the two behaviours?

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