[Sheflug] Re: exportfs weirdness

[Richard Balthazor <r.balthazor [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've traced the problem further and think I know what happened, but not
why, which isn't entirely satisfactory, but I think I can take an educated
guess:

It seems to be to do with the fact that I was exporting both /software and
a subdir of /software, like this:

/software machine1(ro) machine2(ro) ...etc....
/software/OS *.domain.com(ro)

(Why?  because /software is exported to named machines (application data)  
whereas /software/OS is exported everywhere as it contains the Scientific
Linux 304 binaries that I use (with the aid of the network boot disk) to
build new machines, which (at the time of building) don't necessarily have
a static IP/name - nevertheless, any one machine should be mounting 
either one or the other, not both.   You can see this coming, can't you?)

And, the server got itself into a bit of a state:

/var/lib/nfs/etab holds info about what fs *should* be exported where.

/var/lib/nfs/xtab mirrors /proc/fs/nfs/exports and list what fs *are*
actually being exported.

Machine2 had got itself into etab as being eligable to pick up /software
(which is as it should be, as etab is created from /etc/exports) but had
also somehow got itself into xtab as actually mounting /software/OS
(despite the fact that machine2's mtab showed nothing of the sort...).  
Presumably this is why it was upset...

So I halted machine2 and restarted the nfs daemons on the server (which 
cleared the odd entries in xtab and etab) and restarted machine2, and all 
is now well. 

Now, I know why machine2 originally mounted /software/OS (I installed the
OS using a boot CD over the net) but it subsequently was rebooted (near
the end of the install procedure) so I don't know why /software/OS
lingered in the server's xtab (and persisted in lingering despite many nfs
daemon stop-starts) - presumably the fact that machine2 was up during
those server stop-starts meant that the (ghost) connection was retained.

R.

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