Hi all,
I ran into a vague NFS problem today:
At home, I currently have an OpenBSD firewall/server and two Linux
workstations. Last weekend, I finally replaced my Ultrasparc 10 with
OpenBSD 3.8 with a dual PIII running OpenBSD 4.2. Initially, all seemed
well, but today I got problems with NFS. When I started them up today,
one of the Linux boxes (Kubuntu 7.10 on AMD64) had no problems at all
and could get all NFS shares, while the older one (SuSE 10.0 on x86) was
no longer able to mount any NFS shares from the OpenBSD server. Any
mount attempt would take a long time and then fail with an RPC error 5
and some message about an invalid superblock(?) on the NFS share. The
same machine was working perfectly fine yesterday and I haven't made any
changes on either the server or the Linux box since.
I went through /var/log/messages, /var/log/daemon and dmesg on the
server but could not find anything out of the ordinary. 'rpcinfo -p' on
the server didn't show anything unusual. As far as I could see, portmap,
nfsd and lockd were still running - and as I said, the second Linux box
had no problems at all.
On the Linux box, any DNS lookups of the server worked just fine and I
could ping the server without problem. Connections from the Linux box
through the firewall/server to the internet worked fine as well.
Finally, I started tcpdump on the server and performed another mount on the
Linux box. I could see packages go both directions, but don't know
enough to judge whether this was a "normal" exchange.
In the end, I ended up rebooting the server (rebooting the Linux box
hadn't helped) - and this solved the problem. Of course, this is rather
frustrating, as I have no idea what happened here and why. Hence, I'm
primarily looking for some ideas how to investigate should this happen
again... I know it's not that much to go on, but maybe someone has some
hint as to what I could look at or test. I never had any problems like
this before with the old server, so I'm a bit wary as whether I can
trust the new box.
Thanks in advance,
Thomas
P.S.: Another, possibly related oddity: After the server reboot, NFS was
working again on the SuSE box - but I got an error from its NTP that it
could not get its initial time and date from the OpenBSD server. I had
to reboot the Linux box once more to make that one go away. Iffy - no
idea what's going on there.
--
****** PLEASE: NO Cc's to me privately, I do read the list - thanks! ******
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Thomas Ribbrock http://www.ribbrock.org ICQ#: 15839919
"You have to live on the edge of reality - to make your dreams come true!"
