Kerberized NFS state manager failed

Jurjen Bokma

June 2012


Table of Contents

NFS "state manager failed" messages in syslog

An Ubuntu Lucid server on which people log in using SSH, and $HOME is mounted through Kerberized NFS4. The thing is brought almost to its knees with "state manager failed" in /var/log/syslog, repeated hundreds of times a second.

Turns out logging out from SSH removes Kerberos Credentials, and if a process remains doing I/O to $HOME, then rpc.gssd will start spamming the syslog. There is a fix that reduces the spamming, but it is nog yet in Lucid(!).

So we tell the ssh daemon not to remove the credentials, by this setting in /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

GSSAPICleanupCredentials no
      

[Note]Note

As a side note, the reason that I/O was still done to $HOME after logout may well be that Matlab was used without modifications to its default working directory. Mindful users will do I/O to local disks instead of network-mounted $HOME, and change the Matlab WD (untested, maybe also read this) from their Matlab programs before logging out.