SUMMARY - Solaris 2.5.1 and automount problems

From: James L. Bovitz II (jlb@rocsoft.rocsoft.com)
Date: Mon Aug 12 1996 - 04:27:18 CDT


Hello All,

Special Thank to all who answered my note:

Matt Bottrell mattb@deakin.edu.au
uunet!fhcrc.org!issysad (System Administration)
Justin Young http://me.subr.edu/~justin justiny@engr.subr.edu
Dave Zarnoch Email davez@mop.com
Dave Colpoys davec@kodak.com

Here is my summary of the Solaris 2.5.1 Auto Mounter Problem:

My Original message was:

> I am having an interesting problem with NFS and the automounter on Solaris
> 2.5.1 on a SPARC Ultra 1 (143MHz).
>
> Our NIS Server runs SunOS 4.1.4 and we have various other mahines running
> SunOS 4.1.4 and SunOS 4.1.3_U1. ALl of these machines export various file
> systems to the network.
>
> The Solaris 2.5.1 system is having major troubles mounting these exported
> drives. Sometimes I can boot the Ultra 4 or five times and then I
> can see all
> the drives as they all get mounted at boot time but then after a period of
> time, if I try to do an ls on one of the drives, the system just
> hangs. If I
> reboot four or five times, I can see the drive again but then the same thing
>
> happens after a while.
>
> I looked through SunSite but could not find any patches specific to this
> circumstance.
>
> The Ultra was configured at install to be a NIS machine (not NIS+). The
> master NIS server (rsasvr1) has auto.master and auto.direct in it's /etc dir
> ectory. The
> file's contents are as follows:
>
> /etc/auto.master:
> /- /etc/auto.direct -rw,intr,hard
>
>
> /etc/auto.direct:
> # actual automounts
> /s1 rocsoft:/s1_
> /s2 rocsoft:/s2_
> /s3 andy:/s3_
> /s4 spiel:/s4_
> /s5 spiel:/s5_
> /s6 spiel:/s6_
> /s7 tiger:/s7_
> /s8 rsasvr1:/s8_
> /s9 image:/s9_
> /s10 rsasvr1:/s10_
> /s11 rsasvr1:/s11_
> /cust rocsoft:/cust_
> # local links
> # note: /home is mounted via /etc/fstab since automount
> # cannot handle recursive mounts
> /rsa localhost:/home/rsa
> /usr/lang localhost:/home/lang
> /usr/local localhost:/home/local
> /usr/man localhost:/home/man
> /usr/tran localhost:/home/tran
> /usr/guide localhost:/home/guide
> /usr/rsa localhost:/home/usr.rsa
>
>
> I created auto.direct in /etc on the Ultra since auto.master refers
> to it by full pathname from root.
>
> It's contents are:
> +auto.direct
>
> On the Ultra, nsswitch.conf contains the following:
> #
> # /etc/nsswitch.nis:
> #
> # An example file that could be copied over to /etc/nsswitch.conf; it
> # uses NIS (YP) in conjunction with files.
> #
> # "hosts:" and "services:" in this file are used only if the
> # /etc/netconfig file has a "-" for nametoaddr_libs of "inet" transports.
>
> # the following two lines obviate the "+" entry in /etc/passwd and /etc/grou
> p.
> passwd: files nis
> group: files nis
>
> # consult /etc "files" only if nis is down.
> hosts: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
> networks: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
> protocols: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
> rpc: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
> ethers: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
> netmasks: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
> bootparams: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
> publickey: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
>
> netgroup: nis
>
> automount: files nis
> aliases: files nis
>
> # for efficient getservbyname() avoid nis
> services: files nis
> sendmailvars: files
>
> Has anyone out there seen this before???
>
> TIA for any help - I will Summarize results.
>

It turns out that the culprit was this section of the auto.direct file:

# local links
# note: /home is mounted via /etc/fstab since automount
# cannot handle recursive mounts
/rsa localhost:/home/rsa
/usr/lang localhost:/home/lang
/usr/local localhost:/home/local
/usr/man localhost:/home/man
/usr/tran localhost:/home/tran
/usr/guide localhost:/home/guide
/usr/rsa localhost:/home/usr.rsa

Apparently, SunOS versions of the automounter had the convention of a
symlink as part of the ufs filesystem so it was acceptable to have the
automounter automatically create the above symlinks.

Solaris 2.5 does not support this as it now considers nfs mounted
filesystems as being of type "autofs" which has no convention for
creating a ufs symlink on the fly. Additionally, the way the mount map
was set up, these sym links really represented "hierarchically related"
mount points from /home back to the /s* mount points. In other words...
a recursive mount which the automounter does not really handle well.

To fix the problem, there are two solutions:

1) Remove the above listed lines from the auto.direct master map and
   create the symbolic links in home manually.

2) Do away with the symbolic links altogether and just make the sym
   links regular mount entries for example:

   Instead of:
   /usr/rsa localhost:/home/usr.rsa

   Use:
   /usr/rsa rsasvr1:/s10_/usr.rsa

   where you are explicitly telling the automounter to mount via
   host:filesystem convention. This creates a regular nfs mount
   and does not try to create a sym link.

Hope this helps and thanks again to all who answered...

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
_/_/ James L. Bovitz II _/_/
_/_/ Senior Field Engineering Coordinator _/_/
_/_/ RSA, Inc. - 25 N. Washington Street Rochester, New York 14614 _/_/
_/_/ Phone: (716)327-7134 Fax: (716)262-4808 E-Mail: jlb@rocsoft.com _/_/
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
_/
Status: RO



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