Really Strange NFS Issues

Hi, folks,
I’m having some really, really strange NFS problems after upgrading to OpenSuSE 11.1. There seems to be a really strange problem with NFS caching in this version of SuSE. If I go to one of my NFS filesystems, and try to use “vi” to edit a new file, I get an error that a swap file for this file already exists. It’s like vi is creating the swap file, but then the date/timestamp is changing just enough to throw things off and then vi checks for existence of a swapfile, again. Another symptom of the issue is that if I try to use ncftpget to download a file to the NFS volume, I get the following error:

Cannot open local file <filename> for writing: Invalid argument.

However, when I look in the directory, <filename> exists and is a 0 byte file. So, again, it’s like it’s creating the file, and then the handle is getting shutdown really quickly, then it retries and sees a file already exists with that name. I’d appreciate any hints on getting to the bottom of this. I’ve already tried changing mount settings like lock/nolock, sync/async, actimeo, acdirmin, acdirmax, etc., and none of those seem to have any effect on the problem. Nothing has changed on the server, either - it really seems to be the upgrade from openSuSE 11.0 to 11.1 - something about 11.1 that is different that’s not allowing NFS to operate correctly.

Thanks - Nick

Okay, well, I’ve been able to narrow things down a little. Seems that this occurs only on directories on NFS-mounted filesystems where default ACL entries are present. Since I rely on ACLs for correct file access across my network, I can’t just turn them off. Maybe I’ll try a new kernel or something like that - not sure if this is a kernel bug, acl bug, etc.

Well, not sure exactly what the issue was here, but running kernel 2.6.29.2 seems to work fine. Looks like there may have been a kernel issue with NFS & ACLs or something like that.