a few months back i had a situation where a child of automount wouldn't exit properly and that would cause the parent to get locked up and all automount would stop working. if i could get onto the system, i could strace the child automounts and watch them exit and eventually i'd hit the one that was the cause and then everything would start working again. there have been a number of kernel updates since and it looked like things were working normally again. but i was wrong, our web server locked up last night from the same issue again. given the length of time between issues and the infeasibility of debugging this on a live server i want to ask about my setup and see if i should change things.
i use a two level automount hierarchy. /home entries are all designed to be bind mounts, like: joey :/disks/hyperion.0/home/joey and then /disks is a normal automount map: hyperion.0 hyperion:/disk/0 repeat this for a few thousand /home entries, but only a handful of entries in /disks. i have done this to avoid thousands of nfs mounts on a busy server (like a mail server). in the past with udp it was bad enough, but now with tcp based nfs, each mount uses even more resources (sockets, tcp buffers, etc). but given this lockup bug, i am thinking of going to a straight single level /home setup. i did some testing with a single level /home and if i touch all entries in /home, i eventually ran into some resource limits. maybe there is some tuning i can do? i could go back to /home just being full of symlinks, but that has so many issues of it's own. i'm looking for feedback of other users that might have servers with a thousand or more active mounts and how that works for you. or some other good ideas of how people handle this kind of thing. _______________________________________________ autofs mailing list autofs@linux.kernel.org http://linux.kernel.org/mailman/listinfo/autofs
