[ale] Lab Workstation Mystery

[Todor Fassl]

The first thing I did was add that option to the nfs mount in the autofs 
config. I thought it didn't work but back then   I didn't have as good 
of a handle on the problem as I do now.  I found bug reports related to 
the default timeout for aufs not working. The bug reports said the 
timeout worked if you set itimplicitly for each share in the autofs 
config files. But that turned out being another red-herring.

I am pretty sure this is a systemd problem. I just did an experiment -- 
I killed off the processes left over after a user logged out on 3 
different workstations but I did not unmount their home directory. Each 
of the 3 had the same 4 processes running, systemd,(sd-pam), 
ibus-daemon, and ibus-dconf. All I did was kill off those 4 processes 
and after the usual time, the automounter unmounted their home 
directory. So I am about as sure as I can be that this is not an 
automounter or nfs problem. It's systemd not killing off those processes 
when a user logs out.

Three days -- so far so good.

On 04/22/2016 11:27 AM, Scott Plante wrote:
> This isn't a solution to the underlying problem, but you might want to 
> consider the "soft" option for the NFS mount. By default, NFS is 
> designed to act like a physical disk in the sense that once the user 
> initiates a write, it will block at that spot until the write 
> completes. This is great if you have a NAS unit in the next rack slot 
> from your database server. However, if you don't need quite that level 
> of write assurance, the "soft" option acts more like a typical remote 
> network share. If a problem occurs, the writer will just get an I/O 
> error and be forced to deal with it. You won't get the kind of system 
> hanging you experience with hard mounts. If you're just saving 
> documents and doing that kind of basic file I/O this is perfect. 
> You're mounting home directories, so you're somewhere in between, but 
> depending on what your users are actually doing, soft mounts may be 
> for you. Again, this doesn't explain the whole re-mounting read-only 
> behavior but it may still be helpful for you to look into.
>
> Scott
>
>
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