Home

NFS Stale File Handle

1 Overview

When an NFS client accesses an inode that no longer available on the server, the stale file handle error (ESTALE) occurs.

Reproduce cases:

While the client currently opens an NFS directory, the server deletes it.
While the client currently opens an NFS directory, the server exports a different directory.

2 Setup Lab

Setup lab: Network File System (NFS).
VM1 acts as NFS server.
VM2 acts as NFS client.

vm1$ exportfs -v
/srv/nfs 192.0.0.0/24(sync,wdelay,hide,no_subtree_check,sec=sys,rw,secure,root_squash,no_all_squash)

vm2$ df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
192.0.0.10:/srv/nfs       5.6G    221.0M      5.1G   4% /mnt/nfs

3 Delete an Open Directory

If the server deletes a file or directory while the client currently has open, the inode held by client becomes invalid. The further actions to the inode will fail with ‘Stale file handle’ error.

Server.

Step 1: Create a directory.

vm1$ mkdir /srv/nfs/test

Step 3: Delete the directory.

vm1$ rm -rf /srv/nfs/test

Client.

Step 2: Go to the directory.

vm2$ cd /mnt/nfs/test

Step 4: List files.

vm2:/mnt/nfs/test$ ls
ls: .: Stale file handle

4 Re-Export an Open Directory

TODO…