NFS Stale File Handle error and solution
Sometime NFS can result in to weird problems. For example NFS mounted directories sometimes contain stale file handles. If you run command such as ls or vi you will see an error:
$ ls
.: Stale File Handle
First let us try to understand the concept of Stale File Handle. Managing NFS and NIS, 2nd Edition book defines filehandles as follows (a good book if you would like to master NFS and NIS):
A filehandle becomes stale whenever the file or directory referenced by the handle is removed by another host, while your client still holds an active reference to the object. A typical example occurs when the current directory of a process, running on your client, is removed on the server (either by a process running on the server or on another client).
So this can occur if the directory is modified on the NFS server, but the directories modification time is not updated.
How do I fix this problem?
a) The best solution is to remount directory from the NFS client using mount command:
# umount -f /mnt/local
# mount -t nfs nfsserver:/path/to/share /mnt/local
First command (umount) forcefully unmount a disk partition /mnt/local (NFS).
(b) Or try to mount NFS directory with the noac option. However I don't recommend using noac option because of performance issue and Checking files on NFS filesystem referenced by file descriptors (i.e. the fcntl and ioctl families of functions) may lead to inconsistent result due to the lack of consistency check in kernel even if noac is used.
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I encounter these errors on my Ubuntu client when I reboot my Fedora server with the NFS shares. I find I need to first umount the shares on the client, then restart nsf on the server, then remount the shares on the client. I don’t claim to understand the logic behind this — but it works.