Re: gam_server trying to access non-existence files in /home

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

Justin Willmert