[Ocfs2-users] OCFS2, NFS and random Stale NFS file handles

[Adam Randall]

Please forgive my lack of experience, but I've just recently started deeply
working with ocfs2 and am not familiar with all it's caveats.

We've just deployed two servers that have SAN arrays attached to them.
These arrays are synchronized with DRBD in master/master mode, with ocfs2
configured on top of that. In all my testing everything worked well, except
for an issue with symbolic links throwing an exception in the kernel (ths
was fixed by applying a patch I found here:
comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.ocfs2.devel/8008). Of these
machines, one of them is designated the master and the other is it's backup.

Host is Gentoo linux running the 3.8.13.

I have four other machines that are connecting to the master ocfs2
partition using nfs. The problem I'm having is that on these machines, I'm
randomly getting read errors while trying to enter directories over nfs. In
all of these cases, except on, these directories are immediately
unavailable after they are created. The error that comes back is always
something like this:

ls: cannot access /mnt/storage/documents/818/8189794/: Stale NFS file handle

The mount point is /mnt/storage. Other directories on the mount are
available, and on other servers the same directory can be accessed
perfectly fine.

I haven't been able to reproduce this issue in isolated testing.

The four machines that connect via NFS are doing one of two things:

1) processing e-mail through a php driven daemon (read and write, creating
directories)
2) serving report files in PDF format over the web via a php web
application (read only)

I believe that the ocfs2 version if 1.5. I found this in the kernel source
itself, but haven't figured out how to determine this in the shell.
ocfs2-tools is version 1.8.2, which is what ocfs2 wanted (maybe this is
ocfs2 1.8 then?).

The only other path I can think to take is to abandon OCFS2 and use DRBD in
master/slave mode with ext4 on top of that. This would still provide me
with the redundancy I want, but at a lack of not being able to use both
machines simultaneously.

If anyone has any advice, I'd love to hear it.

Thanks in advance,

Adam.


-- 
Adam Randall
http://www.xaren.net
AIM: blitz574
Twitter: @randalla0622

"To err is human... to really foul up requires the root password."
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