Re: how to limit /etc/daily to local only, and cleasring bad nfs

[steve%prd.co.uk@localhost (Steve Blinkhorn)]

You wrote:
> 
> On 27/05/2022 17:18, Steve Blinkhorn wrote:
> > 1. How to limit /etc/daily,weekly,monthly so they do not cross nfs mount
> > points?  One of my development systems crashes occasionally when left
> > running a long job after hours.  It reboots itself, but nfs
> > connections to it are not restored.  What I don't notice is that
> > /etc/daily now hangs on a public-facing machine.  Gradually the humber
> > of processes increases day by day until I have numerous find, tee,
> > sendmail and sh proceses all stuck.
> > 
> What paths have you got NFS mounted on the client?
> 
> I've got 2 BSD system both 9.2-STABLE one of which provides an NFS /home 
> and a few other odd paths as well to the other. The /etc/daily process 
> on the client isn't scanning the server filesystems in my setup and I'm 
> not aware of any specific setting I had to turn on to get that behaviour.
> 
> Mike
> 

Some off-list discussion has clarified matters.  The fundamental problem is that nfs
mounts are not restored automatically when an nfs server is rebooted - and that
may happen automatically so the sysadmin is unaware.

The connection with /etc/daily (etc.) is that find(1) hangs when it encounters a broken
nfs mount point, gets stuck in tstile, and can't be killed.  So the process table grows by 4
processes/day (/bin/sh /etc/daily, find, tee, sendmail -t).

I run 6 NetBSD servers, 3 of them public-facing, with numerous nfs cross-mounts for
convenience in rapid deployment, and have hit this issue several times since
NetBSD-3.0, without realising the root of the problem.  The fix is essentially on the
rebooted server, though clearing out all the /bin/sh, tee nd sendmail processes on the
nfs client speeds the resolution.

-- 
Steve Blinkhorn <steve%prd.co.uk@localhost>