automount points become files

Carl Page (carlp@findmail.com)
20 Nov 1998 09:49:48 -0000


I'm running kernel 2.0.35 and have a problem where an ls of my automount directory plainly shows my hard-mounted file systems as text files rather than directories. Catting the mount points shows they are in fact single email messages of the type my filesystem contains (though usually in large mbox files rather than single message per file.)

This happens about once every 6 days per machine, with disasterous results for my web server, which expects to find a directory containing linux-kernel mail (among others) instead of a text file containing a single message.

Simply umount'ing the file system restores it to working order, which suggests a workaround of stat-ing the mounts and unmounting any that have become files... but I'm unhappy with the kludgeyness of that evasive action.

The mounts are used ALMOST entirely read-only although extremely infreqent writes are more common than the problem. Usually a message at a time is read using its offset out of a huge mbox file. Many of the files run are large, (50 Meg or so) and are freqently growing by append (but that isn't thru NFS.)

I figure it is the automounter or nfsd messing up. Has anyone experienced this or have any better workarounds?

(arl

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/