[CentOS] autofs problems

Wed Dec 30 18:20:31 UTC 2009
Kwan Lowe <kwan.lowe at gmail.com>

On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 10:04 PM, Mag Gam <magawake at gmail.com> wrote:
> We have about 800 CentOS 5.2 servers and our university. We use NFS
> being served from over 10 NetApp frames. We use autofs for to mount up
> our partitions. There have been times where we can't cd into the
> directory. It says the directory does not exist. On some servers it
> works but on others it does not. Typically we restart amd and autofs
> to resolve this issue. But sometimes it does not even work. A reboot
> fixes the problem. I am wondering if anyone knows any tricks to check
> if autofs is working properly on the system and also what I should do
> in a situation like this.

I use a frontend to autofs called autohome. One thing to check is the
nesting level of directories in the autohome configuration. If your
nesting is too flat you can end up with hundreds of separate mounts in
a single directory which can lead to some performance issues (not sure
why).  I don't see this unless I start hitting about 100 mounts inside
a directory though.