[SUMMARY] NFS - strange .nfsXXXX files

My Original Post is below.
Thanks to:
 -Vahid Moghaddasi , t-online.de, Dragon King  , Jason Heiss, David
Foster,
  Jay Lessert ,  Andrew Rotramel, Darren Dunham, Kacem El Kassemi
,Christopher
  L. Barnard, Thomas Wardman, Debbie Tropiano, Ric Anderson ,Matthew
Stier,
  Reginald Beavers, Wout Mertens, Casper Dik. 

- You need to go back to CS school first before posting such question.
- Did you read the details of the NFS protocol ?
- Not a problem it is how NFS work. They are files created for good
reason.
- Short Explanation:
    When a client still has an NFS shared file open and some process
deletes
    the file on the same client, the NFS client renames it to
".nfsXXXXX" in
    the same directory.  Then, when process that has the file open
terminates, 
    e.g., when the client shuts down cleanly, the client tells the NFS
    server to remove the file.   
    The file is renamed to prevent the program that still has the file
open 
    from getting "stale NFS file handle" errors. 
  
- More Details:
   Because NFS is stateless the server has no concept of an open file. 
   However an NFS client does "understand" the concept of an open 
   file.  When an unlink(remove) is done on a NFS client and the file is
open 
   the NFS client sends a rename request to the server.  The file is 
   still accessible to any processes that have it open just like on 
   an open file system. The file is renamed to .nfsNNNN.  
   When the last close is done on the file, the client then sends a 
   remove file request to the server.  These files are probably sitting 
   around due to a client crash.  

- In the past there have been bugs were clients left these files around;

  make sure your clients are up to date. 
  
- These files are mentioned in the FILES section of the nfsd man page. 

- Make sure that the following entry exists in the root crontab on the
NFS
server:
   15 3 * * 0 /usr/lib/fs/nfs/nfsfind 
   nfsfind script cleans these files out from time to time if they
exists
because of a client crash without sending a  
   remove request to the server.(nfsfind script exists in both Solaris
6/8)

- Links:

 - http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/faq/questions/help-nfs.html
 -
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=JIM.
95Mar2145029@dewar.cs.strath.ac.uk  

Thanks Guys.

Levi

-----Original Message-----
From: sunmanagers-admin@sunmanagers.org
[mailto:sunmanagers-admin@sunmanagers.org] On Behalf Of Levi Ashcol
Sent: Friday, August 30, 2002 11:21 AM
To: sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
Subject: NFS - strange .nfsXXXX files 


Hi Gurus,
I have users' home directories NFS auto-mounted from an E3000 server.
(Solaris 6) 

I found many files in the users' home directories in the format
(.nfsXXXX =.nfs05E4 .nfs06A0........).

It looks like an nfs problem. It seems they are temporary files but they
are randomly created and never being deleted again. 

- Did any Guru out there know what is the source of these files ?
- How can I stop these files from being created ? (sometimes they
populate the user directory and fill up his quota !)
- Any link/URL/document that describe the nature of this problem ?
- Any patch/kernel parameter/Environment variable/NFS setting/mount
option to set to get rid of these files ?

Will Summarize.

Thanks

Levi
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