Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Major NFSv4 issue with CentOS 5.4 / RHEL 5.4

I updated my NFS server yesterday to EL5.4 (kernel 2.6.18-164.el5) as well as the client workstations. The clients mount /home via NFSv4.

Shortly there after my users began reporting odd behavior like "Firefox bookmarks won't load".

I decided to test it remotely and encountered a file locking problem with .Xauthority:

$ ssh -X wkstation01
/usr/bin/xauth: error in locking authority file /home/flakrat/.Xauthority

After much digging, an IRC user in #RHEL pointed me to the following bug:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=524520

Three immediate solutions:
  • Reboot to the previous 2.6.18-128.7.1.el5 kernel until the new kernel is released
  • Download the patches in the bug and rebuild the kernel
  • Get RH support to send you the interim patched kernel