[KLUG Members] NFS problems viewing subdirectories

[Susan Ator]

We are having a (hopefully not unique) problem with our nfs shares.

We have RedHatES4 as our NFS server and 2 RedHatES3 clients.

The exports on the es4 server are:

/imagesStore xxx.xxx.x.xx1(rw,sync) xxx.xxx.x.xx2(rw,sync)
/docsStore xxx.xxx.x.xx1(rw,sync) xxx.xxx.x.xx2(rw,sync)
/exchangeStore xxx.xxx.x.xx1(rw,sync) xxx.xxx.x.xx2(rw,sync)
/audioStore xxx.xxx.x.xx1(rw,sync) xxx.xxx.x.xx2(rw,sync)

and the mount points on the 2 es3 servers are:

xxx.xxx.x.xx:/docsStore /path_to/docs nfs
rw,sync,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,hard,intr 0 0
xxx.xxx.x.xx:/imagesStore /path_to/images nfs
rw,sync,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,hard,intr 0 0
xxx.xxx.x.xx:/exchangeStore /path_to/exchange nfs
rw,sync,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 0
xxx.xxx.x.xx:/audioStore /path_to/audio nfs
rw,sync,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 0

Each of the mountpoints have subdirectories which exist on the nfs
server.

We have been dealing with an ongoing but sporadic problem of the
subdirectories becoming unreadable in the various mountpoints.

For example:

ls on /path_to/docs will show 3 directories (dir1, dir2, dir3).
ls on dir1 will show results.
ls on dir2 will show results.
ls on dir3 will give an error message that dir3 does not exist.

or:

ls on dir3 will show 3 subdirectories (subdir1, subdir2, subdir3)
ls on subdir1 will show results.
ls on subdir2 will show results.
ls on subdir3 will give an error message that subdir3 does not exist.

This problem can occur anywhere down the chain of directories and
subdirectories. We are pulling our hair out trying to figure this out.
Does anyone have any recommendations?

sator