From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2 Description of problem: We have several different automounts in place, including scratch space, projects, home directories, and system files (linked to /usr/local). After specifying the "--ghost" option in /etc/sysconfig/autofs and rebooting, our systems were fine at first, but started experiencing problems that were never present before the ghosting option was specified. Users' rc files weren't sourced, and the entire /usr/local tree would disappear until manually remounted (read: by ls'ing it). This was never the case before the ghosting option; whenever the system needed a file from our automount, it would automatically mount it without requiring an ls first, so this is definitely linked to the ghosting behavior. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): autofs-4.1.3-47 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Set up an automount point with executables and libraries. 2. Wait however long your specified timeout is (default is 60 seconds). 3. Try to use a program / file from the mount (should work). 4. Add "--ghost" option to DAEMONOPTIONS in /etc/sysconfig/autofs. 5. Reboot. 6. Wait for timeout. 7. Try to use the same program / file. Actual Results: Granted, these are more conceptual steps, but the system claims it cannot find files on the mount until after you do an explicit listing of the mount. Expected Results: It should have remounted anyway, without needing an ls. Additional info: A particular fix we used was a change to /etc/init.d/autofs, which allowed us to specify which automount points we wanted ghosted, instead of having an "all or nothing" situation. It would be nice to see this implemented natively as well. It was very simple to write, only a few lines: ghostdirs="$(echo "$GHOSTDIRS" | sed 's/ /\|/g')" if echo "$dir" | grep -qE -- "^($ghostdirs)\$" ; then startupoptions="$startupoptions --ghost" fi This allows us to specify a space-delimeted list of target mount points that we want ghosted through the variable GHOSTDIRS in /etc/sysconfig/autofs. This isn't a permanent fix, but we were able to only ghost project and scratch space, while keeping system mounts un-ghosted.
Please only report one bug per bugzilla. Open another bug request with severity of 'enhancement' for your GHOSTDIRS change.
Could you please provide the information requested in the section "Filing bug reports" found at the following URL: http://people.redhat.com/jmoyer Thanks.
We're still waiting for more information on this one. Could you please update the bug?
Sorry, I'm working in the context of a research facility and gathering the necessary information would be time-consuming and possibly a breach of security. If the bug isn't easily reproducible, then it can be deleted.
Well, if you were running into the expire race, then that issue is going to be fixed in U6. Are you still experiencing the problem? Would you be able to report your testing results (meaning just whether or not the bug went away) when U6 is released?
Having ghosted mounts was an auxillary feature that was nice, but not necessary. We haven't been using it since. If the update is supposed to fix something that might be related, I'm sure we'd be willing to give it another shot.
U6 has been released. The version of autofs shipped is 4.1.3-154. Please give it a try, if you have the time. Thanks!
Closing this bug since we can't get any further information on it.