Re: NFS problems with SGI client

Peter Benie (pjb1008@cam.ac.uk)
Sat, 17 Oct 1998 12:24:38 +0100

Steven N. Hirsch writes ("NFS problems with SGI client"):
> Bill,
>
> I'm having repeatable NFS wierdness when mounting recent Linux servers
> >from an SGI box running IRIX 5.3. Everything seems fine, but long
> 'configure' scripts will eventually fail with spurious reports that
> 'conftest.out' and/or 'conftest.in' cannot be opened, written, read, etc.
> Sometimes, a number of tests in a row will fail in this fashion, only to
> have the run pick up and recover for a while. One application, amd-utils,
> has the most intricate configure I've ever seen and literally cannot
> complete successfully due to the above errors! When everything concerned
> is moved to local storage, it runs fine.

This feels like a client caching problem. If you read a file as root,
the NFS server may deny access. The client then stores the fact that
the file is not readable in its cache.

If a non-root process requests the same file, the client may look in
its cache, see that the file is not readable, and deny access. If you
snoop the network, I think you'll find that when the client is
producing these errors it isn't actually talking to the NFS server.
Eventually, the cache entry expires and the client starts working
again.

I know that certain versions of IRIX have this problem, and there may
well be a patch for it.

Peter

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