Chris Jones <c.r.jonesNOSPAM@larc.nasa.gov> wrote:
> Folks have been saying that /xfn is under the control of automounter...
> and that I was aware of. But there's nothing at all running
> automounter-wise.

Are you sure? The truss output in you first posting showed:

open64("/xfn", O_RDONLY|O_NDELAY) = 4
fcntl(4, F_SETFD, 0x00000001) = 0
fstat64(4, 0xFFBEEF50) = 0
d=0x04180002 i=7 m=0040555 l=1 u=0 g=0 sz=1
at = Jun 8 14:17:33 EDT 2005 [ 1118254653 ]
mt = Jan 24 13:31:52 EST 2005 [ 1106591512 ]
ct = Jan 24 13:31:52 EST 2005 [ 1106591512 ]
bsz=8192 blks=1 fs=autofs

See "fs=autofs" in the last line. What does "cd /xfn; df -k ." show?

> So... thanks for the suggestions, but they all are related to
> automount'ing which doesn't apply to me. Has anybody out there who's
> *not* running automounter ever seen problems with the /xfn directory?

If automount isn't handling /xfn, it will be a regular, empty directory.
Besides file system inconsistencies, it's hard to imagine that it causes
hangs or errors.

mp.
--
Systems Administrator | Institute of Scientific Computing | Univ. of Vienna