SUMMARY: How to get rid of stale mount points on Solaris 8?

Hi.  Thanks to everyone who responded to my post.  The most common 
suggestion was:

umount -f

This didn't work for my situation (the filesystem wasn't "busy", the 
mount point no longer existed, so it couldn't really unmount it).

Also lsof and fuser were suggested, but didn't work in my case for the 
above reason.

Editing the /etc/mnttab file was also suggested.  I tried this on a 
throwaway system just to test it and at least on Solaris 8 it  wouldn't 
let  me change it ("Operation not applicable").  At least not using vi.

I re-created the filesystem problem (mounting a filesystem and then 
moving it to a different directory) and ran some tests
	Re-creating and then moving it to the original mount point allowed 
the filesystem to be unmounted.  This didn't work for me previously, I'm 
not sure why.
	stopping and restarting the /etc/init.d/nfs.client daemons didn't 
remove the stale mount point.  I couldn't test the nfs.server daemons 
because these are production systems...

The CD problem was resolved with

Stopping vold
rm -rf /vol
and then restarting vold.

Thanks again for all of your help.

--jenny

Jennifer L. Fox
Network Administrator
Research Vessel/IceBreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer

Current Location:  67.57 S, 72.09 W


Original message below

From: "Fox, Jenny" <foxje@nbp.polar.org>
Date: Sun Feb 17, 2002  11:04:34 AM America/Santiago
To: sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
Subject: How to get rid of stale mount points on Solaris 8?

Hello there.  I am not currently subscribed to the list, as I am on 
board a research vessel in the Antarctic region.  I don't have access to 
a lot of reference materials, and one question has come up a few times - 
how to get rid of a stale mount point on Solaris 8 without rebooting?

The first situation was when a CD was removed from the drive without 
being unmounted - even stopping and restarting the volume manager had no 
effect, and a "mount" command showed the phantom CD there.  Rebooting of 
course fixed the problem.

The second time this occurred was when a scientist manually mounted a 
directory and later the parent directory of the mount point was changed, 
leaving a stale entry.  It doesn't really hurt anything (I think) but if 
we do a "df" or something similar we get the message "cannot statvfs 
/the/old/mount/point: No such file or directory".  Re-creating the 
directory structure and then trying to unmount the filesystem did not 
fix the problem.

I actually can reboot these machines without too much harm done, but I 
was curious if there is a better way.  Please answer me directly, as I 
can't receive the volume of mail that being on this list generates.  
Also, plain text email is preferable, as we pay for transfers 
essentially by the kilobyte.

--jenny

Jennifer L. Fox
Network Administrator
Research Vessel/IceBreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer
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