problems with automount

[Stuart Levy]

In article <9101231344.AA15399 at smithkline.com> dixons%phvax.dnet at SMITHKLINE.COM writes:
>Has anyone been using automount with Irix 3.3.1 on multiprocessor machines?
>...
>First observed problems usually are with df...
>Then gradually (over about an hour or so) other disk related things
>(like ls and pwd) begin to hang.  When a process hangs in this case, you can't
>interrupt it or kill it although you can ^Z it and leave it in the background.
>Eventually you can no longer log in to the system (although compute bound jobs
>seem to continue to run) and the only thing to do is push the reset button....
>If anyone else is seeing similar problems, or is running automount fine
>on MP machines, I would like to hear about it.
>
>Scott Dixon (dixons at smithkline.com)

We're running 3.3.1 on an MP machine using NFS with *NO* automounting nor
lockd/statd, but we do have occasional problems similar to yours, I think.

Some disk-related things will hang while others keep working for a while,
as gradually more and more shell windows wedge; existing programs (clock, NeWS
interaction) seem to keep running; it's impossible to log in (network daemons
respond but logins hang before reaching a shell prompt); inetd-started daemons
still answer for a while, then TCP connections cease to open (maybe when the
listen() queues fill?).  No "NFS server not responding" messages appear.
I keep thinking there's some important inode ("/"?) getting locked,
but it's hard to tell.  It happens fairly quickly -- "a while" on our system
tends to be ~5 minutes rather than an hour.

SGI support was sympathetic, but it was hard to pin anything down.
Since talking to them we've started running a network daemon that lets you
cause a panic remotely, i.e. get a crash dump.  (Anyone wanting this daemon,
let me know.)  This syndrome has recurred once since then; I haven't yet shown
SGI the resulting dump, and can't see how to get much out of it with dbx -k.

   Stuart Levy, Geometry Group, University of Minnesota
   slevy at geom.umn.edu