Did some more testing. All of the problems seems to be client side. Dropping back to 2.6.32, both automounts and the flock $0 script work over NFS. But did discover something interesting. After a fresh boot, the follow both work with 2.6.32: $ ls /share/images $ ls /share/images/ With 2.6.39, the first always fails, and the second succeeds (that is the second succeeds if it's the first thing done after a reboot). mrc