Need Help to Fix Stale NFS File Handle

[Alex Dean]

On Feb 25, 2011, at 6:33 PM, Mark Phillips wrote:

> 
> 
> On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 4:57 PM, Alex Dean <alex at crackpot.org> wrote:
> 
> On Feb 25, 2011, at 4:35 PM, Mark Phillips wrote:
> 
> > What if I just delete the files that have stale NFS file handles and re-install them?
> >
> > Mark
> 
> Then you have no idea if the problem will recur or not.  (If it happened once, it probably will again.)  Did you ever check if you have automount running?
> 
> Take a look for automount's config files and see if anything seems familiar.
> $ ls /etc/auto*
> 
> hammerhead:/home/mark# ls /etc/auto*
> ls: cannot access /etc/auto*: No such file or directory
>  
> $ cat /etc/auto.master
> Don't have one of those beasts...It doesn't look as if I have automount running. 
> 
> Could the stale file handles be caused by the disk controller card failing? And then installing a new card? 
> 

The times that I've seen "stale file handle" errors, it's always been on an NFS client after something problematic has happened on the NFS server.  Usually it means the client is asking for an inode which no longer exists, or something like that.  If you're getting this error while accessing a local filesystem, I really have no idea how.

Can you start with the disk where your images reside, and map out how they're accessed?  Which disk are they on, which partition, which linux device (/dev/sda2), which mount point, any symlinks involved, etc?  Try to find any possible way you might be using NFS (perhaps your single machine is acting as client & server?).

alex