getwd problems

[Eric S. Johnson]

Has anyone else had this problem? After lack of use for a few minutes our
diskless workstations will return the following when asked to pwd:

	pwd: getwd: cannot stat ..

In fact, we get getwd: cannot stat .. message for any use of the getwd
library routine at this point. 

A simple cd $cwd will clear things up, but some folks here are still quite
annoyed because of this problem.  One of the reasons for their concern is
that if your login shell loses its path, no new shelltools can be
initiated.

A cd to any rooted path will make the problem clear up. 

This does not seem to happen on the fileservers, or on systems with 3.X
based NFS code..

Facts:
SunOS 4.0.1 running on diskless 3/50/60/110's. 

Any idea why this happens? Any idea how to make it stop? 

Eric Johnson
<esj at ufl.edu>

[[ Are you running the automounter?  I didn't think it could unmount a
partition if you were still "cd"-ed there, but anything is possible.  It
could also be some strange NFS cacheing problems (I've seen quite a few
bits of bizarre NFS behavior under 4.0.1).  Next time, try running "sync"
and see if that clears up the problem.  --wnl ]]