Bug#632141: rpc.gssd: ERROR: can't open /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs/nfs/clnt[[:xdigit:]]+: No such file or directory

[Sergio Gelato <Sergio.Gelato@astro.su.se>]

Package: nfs-common
Version: 1:1.2.2-4

On a VM where autofs is being kept rather busy mounting and unmounting NFS
shares I get a stream of messages like the following:

rpc.gssd[513]: ERROR: can't open /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs/nfs/clnt1ac6: No such file or directory
rpc.gssd[513]: ERROR: can't open /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs/nfs/clnt1aca: No such file or directory

and so on with the client counter incrementing in uneven steps. From eyeballing
the logs I'd say that about 1-3% of the clnt* directories give rise to such a
message.

The message is generated by utils/gssd/gssd_proc.c:process_clnt_dir(), which
is called from utils/gssd/gssd_proc.c:process_pipedir(). The latter does a
scandir(3) on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs/nfs, then calls process_clnt_dir()
for every entry whose name begins with "clnt". process_clnt_dir() tries to
open(2) the clnt* directory and sometimes gets ENOENT. My guess is that there
is a race condition: something else removes clnt* directories between the
scandir() and the open(). If so, maybe the message should be downgraded to
a WARNING and not printed at verbosity 0?

I haven't been able to discern an actual impact other than the stream of
error messages in the logs. Of course that doesn't mean that there is no 
such impact.