Serviceguard NFS Toolkit A.11.31.02 Release Notes (February 2007)

Known Problems and Workarounds

The following is a list of known problems and, where possible, the appropriate workarounds for Serviceguard

A.11.31.02:

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 Highly Available NFS server systems running AutoFS. You can safely

use AutoFS on client systems.

Cause

Highly Available 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 Highly Available 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 Highly Available 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

mentions that there can be stale entries in the file, so it is also unreliable in a standard NFS server and client

environment.

Software Availability in Native Languages

Not applicable