NFS Stale File Handle

[jkraw90]

I currently have a home network setup so that my main machine shares it’s external hard-drive via NFS. This has been working perfectly for months, however I just got a new laptop, installed openSuse 11.3 x64 and set everything up. Now there is two folders on the external network mount that won’t let me do anything and always just return Networking: Stale NFS File Handle.

The system still works fine under my old openSUSE 11.2 x86 laptop. I have tried unmounting the drive from the laptop, restarting the NFS client, and restarting the NFS server on the main machine. None of these have made a difference.

It is only these two folders that are effected. Everything else works just fine.

[djh-novell]

jkraw90 wrote:
> I currently have a home network setup so that my main machine shares
> it’s external hard-drive via NFS. This has been working perfectly for
> months, however I just got a new laptop, installed openSuse 11.3 x64 and
> set everything up. Now there is two folders on the external network
> mount that won’t let me do anything and always just return Networking:
> Stale NFS File Handle.
>
> The system still works fine under my old openSUSE 11.2 x86 laptop. I
> have tried unmounting the drive from the laptop, restarting the NFS
> client, and restarting the NFS server on the main machine. None of these
> have made a difference.
>
> It is only these two folders that are effected. Everything else works
> just fine.

Stale NFS handles are a pain

If you did exactly what you wrote, it won’t solve the problem. You need
to change the order. unmount the drive from the laptop, restart the NFS
server and then remount.

If that doesn’t solve it, these two links give some further options to try:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/nfs-stale-file-handle-error-and-solution.html
http://www.sunmanagers.org/pipermail/summaries/2002-January/000726.html

The lazy man’s way is to reboot everything, but that’s not the
Linux/Unix way.

Cheers, Dave

[jkraw90]

Thanks for reply Dave.

Finally got it working (for the moment).

The process I followed was to :-

1. Umount from laptop
2. Stop NFS Client on laptop
3. Stop NFS server main machine
4. Unmont drive on main machine (finally had to use umount -l to make it work)
5. Re-mount drive on main machine.
6. Restart NFS Server and Client on respected machines.
7. Mount drive on laptop.

As a side comment due to the setup of my server it’s actually slower to do a full reboot of everything as that would mean restarting a whole load of services that I haven’t got round to making a start-up script for yet. Less fun anyway

[please_try_again]

@jkraw90

Thanks for reply Dave.

Finally got it working (for the moment).

The process I followed was to :-

1. Umount from laptop
2. Stop NFS Client on laptop
3. Stop NFS server main machine
4. Unmont drive on main machine (finally had to use umount -l to make it work)
5. Re-mount drive on main machine.
6. Restart NFS Server and Client on respected machines.
7. Mount drive on laptop.

As a side comment due to the setup of my server it’s actually slower to do a full reboot of everything as that would mean restarting a whole load of services that I haven’t got round to making a start-up script for yet. Less fun anyway

After stopping the NFS server and before restarting it, delete the file /var/lib/nfs/rmtab on the server.

@djh-novell

Stale NFS handles are a pain

+1

[jkraw90]

@please_try_again

After stopping the NFS server and before restarting it, delete the file /var/lib/nfs/rmtab on the server.

I’ll go give this a try as it appears it was only a temporary fix. After shutting down and restarting laptop later on the same folder is returning a NFS Stale File Handle. Strange thing is it’s only with this file and only from this laptop.