Just wanted to let people know about a possible NFS bug. I rebuild httpd
a couple of days ago replacing our old CERN httpd with an NCSA one.

Well, not having read the instructions :-) I hadn't created an index.html file,
or set our Welcome.html in the NCSA config file.

httpd went looking for the non-existant index file, then decided to create its
own.

One of the files it stat'd along the way was a symbolic link to and NFS
mounted dir, specifically,

lrwxrwxr-x  1 root  staff  14 Oct 19 16:12 tar -> /tar/local/tmp
in /local/Web/http/

here's the tail end of the kdump from a ktrace -i httpd

   721 httpdNCSA RET   read 756/0x2f4
   721 httpdNCSA CALL  close(0x7)
   721 httpdNCSA RET   close 0
   721 httpdNCSA CALL  stat(0xf7bf385c,0xf7bf37f8)
   721 httpdNCSA NAMI  "/local/Web/http/HEADER.html"
   721 httpdNCSA RET   stat -1 errno 2 No such file or directory
   721 httpdNCSA CALL  stat(0xf7bf385c,0xf7bf37f8)
   721 httpdNCSA NAMI  "/local/Web/http/HEADER"
   721 httpdNCSA RET   stat -1 errno 2 No such file or directory
   721 httpdNCSA CALL  getdirentries(0x5,0x49000,0x1000,0x48b34)
   721 httpdNCSA RET   getdirentries 2048/0x800
   721 httpdNCSA CALL  stat(0xf7bf37fc,0xf7bf38fc)
   721 httpdNCSA NAMI  "/local/Web/http/.."
   721 httpdNCSA RET   stat 0
   721 httpdNCSA CALL  stat(0xf7bf37fc,0xf7bf38fc)
   721 httpdNCSA NAMI  "/local/Web/http/dave.html"
   721 httpdNCSA RET   stat 0
   721 httpdNCSA CALL  stat(0xf7bf37fc,0xf7bf38fc)
   721 httpdNCSA NAMI  "/local/Web/http/dave1.html"
   721 httpdNCSA RET   stat 0
   721 httpdNCSA CALL  stat(0xf7bf37fc,0xf7bf38fc)
   721 httpdNCSA NAMI  "/local/Web/http/dave2.html"
   721 httpdNCSA RET   stat 0
   721 httpdNCSA CALL  stat(0xf7bf37fc,0xf7bf38fc)
   721 httpdNCSA NAMI  "/local/Web/http/tar"

Nothing more gets written to the trace file because the machine panics at
this point with

panic: nfsreq nogrps

I was using the symlink for testing purposes, but I've taken the easy way
out this time of simply rm'ing it. Machine no longer crashes. Just thought
I'd pass this along in case anyone else runs into something similar.

						David Maxwell
						david@spinne.web.net