Summary: Stale NFS Handle

Hi Guru's,
Thanks for all the swift replies. I realised i had given a very skimpy
overview of the problem in my original mail.
I am running Solaris 7, using NIS and had been mounting my home directly
remotely via automount.
I then switched my home directory to a different server for space reasons,
and gave /home/plennon time to umount automatically with automounter. It did
not though and caused the stale handle problem. Because it was Solaris 7 i
could not use 
umount -f /home/plennon. 
The solution was provided by both Dave Zarnoch, and John E.Riddoch, both of
whom suggested i use lsof to find out which process was actually still
holding a file descriptor for /home/plennon.
This is the solution:

bash-2.02$ lsof /home/plennon
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() nfs file system /home/plennon
      Output information may be incomplete.
      assuming "dev=2d40099" from /etc/mnttab
lsof: WARNING: access /home/plennon/.lsof_fame: Stale NFS file handle
lsof: WARNING: can't unlink /home/plennon/.lsof_fame: Stale NFS file handle
COMMAND   PID USER   FD   TYPE  DEVICE SIZE/OFF   NODE NAME
smbd    19358 root  cwd   VDIR 181,153      512 338091 /home/plennon
(<remote_host>:/export/home/plennon). 

I had been using samba to access my home directory when it happened.
When i restarted this process I got the following:

bash-2.02$ lsof /home/plennon
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() nfs file system /home/plennon
      Output information may be incomplete.
      assuming "dev=2d40099" from /etc/mnttab
lsof: WARNING: access /home/plennon/.lsof_fame: Stale NFS file handle
lsof: WARNING: can't unlink /home/plennon/.lsof_fame: Stale NFS file handle

Then i simply umounted /home/plennon with no problems. 

lsof is a very useful tool which i had recently started to use on test
machines but had been unwilling to install on a production server. 

Thanks also to the following people who replied with solutions: 	
Barazani
Sean Bourke
Kumar Shravan
Mark McManus
Robert Reynolds
Tan Tshun Kiat
Thomas Anders
Wesley Suess.

regards,
Padraig					

<original message>

Hi Guru's
Quick NFS question. Is there any known way of clearing stale nfs handles
without rebooting the machine.
The machine in question is a production machine, and the share in question
is my home directory. The only solution that i know of is rebooting. Has
anyone got over this problem?

This is the output from df -k
df: cannot statvfs /home/plennon: Stale NFS file handle


I will summarise.
Thanks in advance,
Padraig 
	




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