Today at work, instead of doing something useful, I’ve been beating my head against NFS in my Beowulf. I have 3 or 4 very special users that get their home directory mounted by autofs. On the very next cycle when autofs goes to try to unmount unused home directories these specific mount points go stale. The ls command reports no file or directory. I can cd into these home directories and all I get is a stale NFS handle. My log file has the most interesting part:

nfs_statfs64: statfs error = 2

Google turned up “no matches.” I guess it wont after it indexes this post. But I was completely baffled by that. I’ve no real clue to what this error indicates. The obvious part is that my RHEL 4 NFS server doesn’t get along with RHEL 3 and autofs.

I know NFS is tricky business. But normally, it interoperates with itself pretty well. The only thing I can do here is completely disable the automounter and just use a big NFS mount for /home. I really hate not knowing why.