Reuben D. Budiardja wrote:
Hello,
In my LAN I have a server in which all the /home for users reside. The /home
is shared via NFS. The server also as a NIS server. The server is running
Centos 4.1.
Other machines (including my desktop) in the LAN mount the /home from the
server, using automount.
Here is /etc/auto.master:
/home /etc/auto.home
and /etc/auto.home:
* -rw,intr,soft,timeo=300,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768 server1:/home/&
Sometimes ago, and this has been happening since, I noticed some oddities in
my NFS server. In fact I asked the list about it but got no respond.
Basically the problem was my NFS server has been getting lots of hits by
mount request from my desktop, for non existence files. The log of the NFS
server showes, for example:
Mar 25 14:48:00 server1 rpc.mountd: authenticated mount request from
desktop1.localdomain:769 for /home/format (/home)
Mar 25 14:48:00 server1 rpc.mountd: can't stat exported dir /home/format: No
such file or directory
Mar 25 14:48:01 server1 rpc.mountd: authenticated mount request from
desktop1.localdomain:773 for /home/format (/home)
Mar 25 14:48:01 server1 rpc.mountd: can't stat exported dir /home/format: No
such file or directory
My desktop is running FC4. It turns out that this is caused by a process
called gam_server. Once in a while, after opening some application, (eg.
GIMP, but it could be anything else), I would notice increased disk
activities on the desktop while nothing obvious is happening. Then if I check
my /var/log/message and the /var/log/message of the NFS server, I see the NFS
requests hitting the server as I mentioned above. When I kill the gam_server
process, everything would be fine again, and gam_server restarts itself with
different PID.
This has been happening intermitently. I've done some searching but all I
could come up was that gam_server is somekind of a file monitoring server.
There had been bug reports on bugzilla.redhat.com (againts FC 3, IIRC) that
gam_server was eating up CPU. I am not sure if that's related to this at all.
So I am wondering if anyone experienced something like this or know anything
more about gam_server. I'm wondering also if this is some sort of a bug in
the gam_server itself, or if it's my configuration problem. Any help on my
understanding about gam_server (what is gam_server really for ?) would also
be appreciated.
For reference, my earlier post about this problem that I mentioned above is
here: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=fedora-list&m=113827738925694&w=2
Thank you for any help.
RDB
Just to add a tidbit I have problems with is when I logout of my user
(and even if I switch to runlevel 3), gam_server runs in the background
under my user name with open files to my home directory. My home is also
shared through NFS, so I have to kill the process manually before I can
unmount /home. Maybe this is a normal thing (I haven't really looked
around for an answer), but seeing this I thought I'd just add this.
Justin Willmert
