topic Re: exportfs -a causes VCS panic in ONTAP Discussions

exportfs -a causes VCS panic

seno — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:28:28 GMT

Has anyone seen this? I create new volumes on the appliance, modify the exports file and then do an "exportfs -a". At that point Veritas Cluster Services log an error "5 06:39:00 [host name] nfs: [ID 897781 kern.notice] NFS write error on host [filer name]: Permission denied." At this point the database crashes and fails over to another host.

This doesn't seem like it should be happening.

System: FAS3140c

OnTap: 7.3.1

Re: exportfs -a causes VCS panic

chriskranz — Tue, 05 May 2009 16:49:59 GMT

What are the mount options on the host side? If you use "exportfs -av" what is the output shown?

Re: exportfs -a causes VCS panic

byakimowicz — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:28:19 GMT

What does your exports file entry look like for the volume/qtree in question?

Re: exportfs -a causes VCS panic

pascalduk — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 06:17:16 GMT

Because these kind of problems in the past I never use exportfs -a, but only use exportfs for the volumes/qtrees that changed.

And even though exportfs -a does not unexport unchanged entries and the manuals say it is safe, the access cache for all entries is flushed just like running exportfs -f. This is bad because all host lookups need to be re-looked up and, depending on the workload, this can cause permission denied problems.

Therefore you should change your way of working and only re-export changed entries only on at a time.

Re: exportfs -a causes VCS panic

seno — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:49:51 GMT

Thanks Pascal. This is the method we decided on, as we can't have our production VCS cluster going down.

Re: exportfs -a causes VCS panic

byakimowicz — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:17:35 GMT

Not sure if this helps or not, but we found this bug which is supposedly fixed, but we see almost the exact same behavior.

bugid - 155052

We have seen this specific issue about 8 times in the past few years. It has caused some substantial outages. The most recent was last week. We are only exporting specifc qtrees now.