"Lockd not responding" when Mate or Gnome is used on a client

[feenberg]

We are upgrading our NFS v3 clients to Scientific Linux 7, (pretty much the same as Centos 7) and running into the problem that running Gnome or Mate cause the Truenas server to fail, with a large number of "lockd not responding" messages. If we kill the client process, then the Truenas recovers after a few minutes. This did not happen with any previous Linux client. Our first workaround was to turn off locking on home directories, but eventually we figured out that specifying XDG_CONFIG_HOME in ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs to point to a file on a mount that did not support locking was sufficient. Still we can't help but think this is likely due to some other configuration error on our part and that someone here might have a suggestion.

I am posting here rather than contacting iXsystems support for the Truenas because we don't want to kill the system, even for a few minutes, to reproduce the problem for iX now that we have a workaround.

Daniel Feenberg
NBER

 

[DrKK]

So I've looked around for useful guidance on this, (as I am sure you have before posting), and I've not found anything.

I would really want to think of this as something I want to solve with a client-side guru, not a server-side guru. Have you asked the Scientific Linux guys?

 

[feenberg]

• I spoke to soon of success with setting XDG_CONFIG_HOME to point to a file on a mount that did not support locking. It only delays the appearance of "lockd not responding". What makes the problem more serious is that the server takes 5 minutes to recover, even after the client process is killed, making it a nuisance to other users for us to continue experiementation.

 

[DrKK]

Sounds like a Linux-side problem, really.

 

[feenberg]

I posted to freebsd-questions about this and received a reply: http://freebsd.1045724.x6.nabble.com/Gnome-and-Firefox-lockd-and-NFS-td6281559.html that is essentially "well-known problem, Sun's fault, won't fix, use NFS v4 instead" but I haven't been able to find any details of the actual incompatibility. Very disappointing since v4 would require us to do authentication on the server, which means LDAP, which is a pain. And it is further frustrating not to know what (if any) purpose is served by making an implementation incompatible with Linux. It won't help FreeBSD achieve wider adoption. Both systems claim conformance to x/open standards for NFS locking.

Daniel Feenberg

 

[DrKK]

There are, unfortunately, trade-offs and bumps in the road, no matter how an enterprise answers the BSD vs Linux question.