Local Home Dir Disappearing above NFS mounts

[TiberiusT]

Gd day all,

I have a home server and 5 clients. All Xubuntu 12.10x64. I use NFS for all users to centralise their data on the server but I DO NOT NFS the actual home dir, the ~/ , (maybe I can call this the root home dir?) which contains all the config files for that user and his programs. I kept that local bcos we use Shotwell and Darktable which both read and write extensively to their config files on ~/.config/shotwell and ~/.config/darktable. Darktable (an excellent RAW photo developer) especially bogs down horribly if its config is on NFS. In fstab I then mount all the data dirs (Documents/Videos/Pictures etc) under the users home dir so everything appears local and the network is transparent.

Server fstab example line

/home                /export/home      none    bind  0  0

Server exports example line

/export/home  192.168.1.1/24(rw,nohide,insecure,no_subtree_check,async)

Client fstab example

192.168.1.60:/home/tiberiust/Documents /home/tiberiust/Documents  nfs4 auto  0  0

But I have the following recurring problem: Users randomly lose access to their local root home dir. This also means ofc that any program accessing it’s config files stored in the home dir also has a headfit - so it’s a fairly catastrophic error. I followed https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SettingUpNFSHowTo during setup and everything is as basic as possible.

I can’t narrow down when exactly the home dirs disappear but when they do: In terminal I can’t ls ~/ . /bin/ls works however. Tyring to access as sudo also does not work. sudo mount -a does nothing. The only remedy seems to be to reboot, however sometimes waiting...and waiting can bring it back. BUT - NFS itself is happy, users can always access all their data dirs as normal. I can also access the file system on the local disk without a problem.

I can post all config files if anyone can help but whilst troubleshooting this I have seen posts saying ‘don’t mount NFS shares under frequently used dirs’ (which is exactly what I am doing) but I can’t find any official advice to this effect. Shouldn’t my setup just work?

TIA
T

[TiberiusT]

I switched to using autofs as per this https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Autofs and researched a bit more. I found this thread especially useful:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/29246...-on-nfs-server.

Autofs was very easy to setup and 3 days into the change and it's all working perfectly. Everything is much smoother than it was b4 and I haven't lost the home dir at all. NFS access is instantaneous on my little network. I shall remain in the dark about what went wrong with my previous setup but I won't lose any sleep over it...solved is solved

T