I have just built a new machine and installed openSUSE 12.2 (64bit). Initially as a user I had a few issues with Dolphin, where certain views would not list files known to be in a folder, but after a reboot that problem seemed to have gone away.
Yesterday evening I made an nfs connection to my old machine (openSUSE 11.4) and transferred some files to the new machine. I also connected to the old machine using ssh. The nfs mountpoint was in my home folder.
On returning to the machine a few hours later, I found that ssh was hung, and no file manager is able to list /home/myusername (ls, Thunar, Dolphin) - this applies also if I su to root (terminal session just hangs cd’ing into my home folder. I also can’t navigate into the mountpoint folder. (Yes, the other machine is still running.) However, there is no problem listing the other folders in /home and if I for example cd /home/myusername/Downloads, I can list the contents of that folder. Indeed, Thunderbird and even Calc appear to working just fine, saving and loading files into e.g. Documents, and Dolphin / Thunar can list and access files in these sub folders too.
So, any ideas on what’s keeping the /home/myusername folder from being listed? I noticed that if I execute du in /home, it stops after /home/myusername/.ssh
Just a thought,
Although you may believe that something may be hung,
Have you tried one of the following
Browse <up> the tree to a parent folder (any should do) and press F5? That should refresh the file listings
Close and re-open Dolphin (This also auto refreshes)
Only other times I’ve experienced files which exist but aren’t listed are obviously unrelated, eg viewing a Dropbox folder (Dropbox itself might have a sync issue at that time).
I did try browsing higher up the tree, for example /home but I didn’t think to try F5 since I could browse into other locations. When the problem showed up in Dolphin, I immediately tried the console and started Thunar and found the same issues there.
Closing and restarting Dolphin did not help.
Ultimately I needed to shut down to move the machine, and the reboot resolved the issue for now. When shutting down, I noticed that though the system had reported stopping /home and the nfs mountpoint, it stopped with the message ‘Unmounting file systems’ rather than powering off as usual.
I’ll keep a close watch on it though, especially as I still have to install Dropbox.
Yes, same UID - accounts were created in same sequence to make sure of that. The only files copied over at that point were my Thunderbird profile folder, into .Thunderbird and a small folder of other files copied as a test.
On 2013-02-20 23:26, pat17 wrote:
> Yes, same UID - accounts were created in same sequence to make sure of
> that. The only files copied over at that point were my Thunderbird
> profile folder, into .Thunderbird and a small folder of other files
> copied as a test.
fsck, and perhaps surface test (via smartctl long test).
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
pat17 wrote:
>> Ultimately I needed to shut down to move the machine, and the reboot
>> resolved the issue for now. When shutting down, I noticed that though
>> the system had reported stopping /home and the nfs mountpoint, it
>> stopped with the message ‘Unmounting file systems’ rather than powering
>> off as usual.
So, if I understand you,the problem is cured for now. If it does recur,
I would suggest taking the following steps:
(1) do all your investigations using command-line tools. GUI tools don’t
appear to be the cause of the problem and will just confuse finding the
cause. Also, command line tools provide output that you can paste into
your messages.
(2) the problem may be to do with NFS or the underlying network or it
might be local. The first step is always to look at the logs and see if
any errors are reported. Also report the configs for NFS, and provide
computer output as evidence of claims (e.g. use ls -ln to prove that the
UIDs really are the same)
Sorry about the long delay in replying folks, but it’s been a busy week…
In the seven days since I reported the issue, the machine has run without incident - I have not experienced any folder read or listing issues either as root or as myself, whether using the command line or Dolphin. (Running KDE as the desktop.)
I copied a large number of files from the old drive using a USB docking station without any issues, but subsequently put the old drive back into the temporary machine as the situation was a week ago, as there was/is some data that needs to be exported there before transfer to the new machine. I therefore made an NFS mount to that machine using the same mount point as before, and then opened an SSH session as well. After more than 2 days connected, there has been no problem reading my home folder or any other folder, so the issue seems to have disappeared, at least for now. Looking back to the day in the messages file, there are copious numbers of "Activating service name=‘org.kde.powerdevil.backlighthelper’ " messages but nothing which looks like a disk error. I will run fsck on the drives over the weekend as a precaution to make sure all is well.
I’ll keep watch on the situation though and report back if it happens again.
Thanks to all of you for your comments and suggestions - it was great to have your support and encouragement!