Serviceguard NFS Toolkit A.11.11.05 and A.11.23.04 Release Notes

Known Problems and Workarounds

Problem

If you run AutoFS on NFS servers that participate in a Highly Available NFS cluster (through

Serviceguard), the behavior of building a local IP interface list can, in certain cases, render

Serviceguard unable to migrate an NFS package during a fail-over event.

NOTE This problem impacts only HA/NFS server systems running AutoFS. You can

safely use AutoFS on client systems.

Cause

HA/NFS uses relocatable IP addresses that migrate from a primary NFS server to an

adoptive node during a fail-over event. If you start AutoFS on an HA/NFS server after

Serviceguard is running, these relocatable IP addresses are included in AutoFS’ list of local IP

interfaces. AutoFS map entries referencing these relocatable addresses cause AutoFS to

create LOFS mounts to the exported local ﬁlesystems. These LOFS mounts can create

problems with Serviceguard, because HA/NFS does not unmount LOFS ﬁlesystems before a

package migration. AutoFS-managed LOFS mounts that are holding resources in the

exported ﬁlesystems, when Serviceguard tries to initiate a package failover, may render

Serviceguard unable to successfully unmount the local ﬁlesystems and migrate them to the

adoptive node.

Workaround

The workaround for this problem is to start automountd with the -L option. This can be

done by setting the AUTOMOUNTD_OPTIONS variable in the /etc/rc.conﬁg.d/nfsconf ﬁle

before automountd is started.

Problem

The /etc/rmtab ﬁle is not synchronized when an NFS package fails over to the standby node.

This is caused by the design of NFS, which does not keep track of the state of the rmtab. The

man page for rmtab contains a warning that it is not always totally accurate, so it is also

unreliable in a standard NFS server and client environment.