2012-06-19 09:59:07

by Christoph Bartoschek

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Spurious permission denied

Hi,

we still have the problem that some users get permission denied for
directories they normally can access. The problem only affects a single user
at a time and automatically goes away after about 30 minutes.

It seems to be a server problem because this happens on all client machines
at the same time.

Here is how it looks like:

[bartosch@r1106i12 ~]$ ls /afs/eda/prod
ls: cannot open directory /afs/eda/prod: Permission denied
[bartosch@r1106i12 ~]$ id
uid=348(bartosch) gid=200(vls)
groups=200(vlsi),100(users),201(zab),900(ibm),901(iba),902(ama),1001(eda),2030(asi),2057(ecl),41999(tra)
[bartosch@r1106i12 ~]$

I have attached the network traffic that was exchanged between the NFS
server and the client for the ls command captured by wireshark.

Accessing the directory /afs/eda works as expected.

Has anyone an idea what could be wrong?

Thanks,
Christoph Bartoschek


Attachments:
network_traffic.dump (517.00 B)

2012-06-19 19:17:55

by Christoph Bartoschek

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Spurious permission denied

Myklebust, Trond wrote:

>
> NFSv3 doesn't use the mode bits to determine access rights, so looking
> at a GETATTR call isn't really that helpful. You need to catch the
> original ACCESS call and reply in order to figure out what caused the
> permission denied issue.

Hmm.

I started capturing the packets before I tried the ls and stopped some
seconds after ls.

These were the only three packets wireshark captured.

I wait till the problem occurs again and try to get more meaningful packets.

Thanks
Christoph


2012-06-19 13:40:03

by Myklebust, Trond

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Spurious permission denied

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2012-06-20 02:21:42

by Mike Grant

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Spurious permission denied

On 06/19/2012 10:58 AM, Christoph Bartoschek wrote:
> we still have the problem that some users get permission denied for
> directories they normally can access. The problem only affects a single user
> at a time and automatically goes away after about 30 minutes.

We've seen this error quite a bit too, though never managed to pin it
down well enough to report it as it's intermittent and unpredictable. I
agree that it seems to be server side and we tried a few things to get
rid of it. I'm not sure if they worked or if it's just in remission,
but the two things that seemed to help most were:
a) increase the amount of memory in the server (we went from 6 to 24GB)
b) reduce dependence on NIS by (ick) hard coding key users into the
server's /etc/passwd file.

We tried the latter because our NIS server was struggling a lot at the
time and I'm not sure what happens if the NFS server fails to get a NIS
response in a timely manner or gets a failed response (i,e. it can't
identify the user).

It may be worth you seeing if the user id resolves correctly on the
server at the time of the failure. It might also be interesting to know
what happens if you restart the NFS server when you have this problem.
I'm wondering if the 30min thing indicates a cached bad credential or
something that expires after a bit or perhaps the NFS server thread just
gets recycled..

It may also be worth doing a capture on the server side at the same
time, as that might show issues with NIS or whatever you use. There's a
good chance it may not be visible after the problem has occurred though,
if it's cached somewhere.

Anyway, sorry that's not directly helpful, but maybe a few things to try!

Cheers,

Mike.

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