Dear All,

I'm not a unix administrator (he's off sick!) and I'm out of my depth
so I'd appreciate any help anyone could offer on the following problem.

We have an NFS set-up :- both servers and clients are running Solaris
9. "Casual" use of the NFS mount looks ok - we can create/edit/delete
files etc. However we have a 3rd party application which will hang
when writing to the NFS mount. I've traced the system call and it
looks like this:

fcntl(259, F_SETLK, 0xFFFFFFFF7FFF8FC8) (sleeping...)

It sleeps forever (or until it is killed).

Oddly, I've noticed that if I add a new entry in /etc/hosts on the
server which included the UNqualified hostnames of the clients, and
then re-export the filesystems, this seems to work ok. However, the
normal situation - fully qualified names resolved by DNS - doesn't work
for this particular system call. We can probably live with this
workaround but it seems a bit "hacky" and was wondering if anyone could
explain what was going on.

Many thanks
Charlotte

charlottejanehammond@yahoo.com wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> I'm not a unix administrator (he's off sick!) and I'm out of my depth
> so I'd appreciate any help anyone could offer on the following problem.
>
> We have an NFS set-up :- both servers and clients are running Solaris
> 9. "Casual" use of the NFS mount looks ok - we can create/edit/delete
> files etc. However we have a 3rd party application which will hang
> when writing to the NFS mount. I've traced the system call and it
> looks like this:
>
> fcntl(259, F_SETLK, 0xFFFFFFFF7FFF8FC8) (sleeping...)
>
> It sleeps forever (or until it is killed).
>
> Oddly, I've noticed that if I add a new entry in /etc/hosts on the
> server which included the UNqualified hostnames of the clients, and
> then re-export the filesystems, this seems to work ok. However, the
> normal situation - fully qualified names resolved by DNS - doesn't work
> for this particular system call. We can probably live with this
> workaround but it seems a bit "hacky" and was wondering if anyone could
> explain what was going on.
>
> Many thanks
> Charlotte
>

Check that you get identical response on the server and the clients:

getent hosts <IP>
getent hosts <host>

Otherwise correct the hosts entry in /etc/nsswitch.conf,
or the related name service.

--
Michael Tosch @ hp : com

In article <do750l$63s$1@aken.eed.ericsson.se>,
Michael Tosch <eedmit@NO.eed.SPAM.ericsson.PLS.se> writes:
>
> Check that you get identical response on the server and the clients:
>
> getent hosts <IP>
> getent hosts <host>

Check ipnodes before hosts (which is what the software does),
unless you commented ipnodes out in /etc/nsswitch.conf.

> Otherwise correct the hosts entry in /etc/nsswitch.conf,
> or the related name service.

--
Andrew Gabriel

Thank you very much Michael and Andrew!

The problem appears to be the /etc/hosts file on the clients which
containted the _unqualified_ hostname, which contrasted with the server
which used DNS only to resolved the _qualified_ hostname. I don't
understand why this problem only manifests for this single application
while everything else appeared to work ok on the NFS mount. However,
removing the local /etc/hosts entry so that the client also used DNS
seems to have cleared the problem, so I'm happy.

Many thanks again
Charlotte
Andrew Gabriel wrote:
> In article <do750l$63s$1@aken.eed.ericsson.se>,
> Michael Tosch <eedmit@NO.eed.SPAM.ericsson.PLS.se> writes:
> >
> > Check that you get identical response on the server and the clients:
> >
> > getent hosts <IP>
> > getent hosts <host>
>
> Check ipnodes before hosts (which is what the software does),
> unless you commented ipnodes out in /etc/nsswitch.conf.
>
> > Otherwise correct the hosts entry in /etc/nsswitch.conf,
> > or the related name service.
>
> --
> Andrew Gabriel

Charlotte Hammond wrote:
> Thank you very much Michael and Andrew!
>
> The problem appears to be the /etc/hosts file on the clients which
> containted the _unqualified_ hostname, which contrasted with the server
> which used DNS only to resolved the _qualified_ hostname. I don't
> understand why this problem only manifests for this single application
> while everything else appeared to work ok on the NFS mount. However,
> removing the local /etc/hosts entry so that the client also used DNS
> seems to have cleared the problem, so I'm happy.
>

Only locking seems affected. Few applications do locking.

I suspect a bug somewhere in the statd/lockd code,
maybe since a change in the system's name resolution.


--
Michael Tosch @ hp : com