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Is NFS unsafe?
NFS is built on the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) mechanism, making it a stateless protocol. In fact, NFS is not stateless from the client point of view, but it is from the server point of view. This means that the server does not keep any information about the clients using it.
What is meant by stale file handle?
Stale file handles are refreshed when the process reopens the file. Doing so updates the file description with the file’s new inode number if it exists. In most cases, the process must do this internally. Otherwise, we may have to restart it.
How to resolve mount.nfs : stale file handle error?
Learn how to resolve mount.nfs: Stale file handle error on the Linux platform. This is a Network File System error that can be resolved from the client or server end. When you are using the Network File System in your environment, you must have seen mount.nfs: Stale file handle error at times.
Why do I get a stale file handle error?
Stale file handle error means that the NFS server holds an old version of the files in his export path. An NFS server restart can sometimes help. But with older OSs (RHEL/CentOS 6.9) it is sometimes better to revert to NFS3 instead of NFS4. In my experience older NFS4 clients have sometimes difficulties with the newer NFS4.1 servers.
This error denotes that the NFS share is unable to mount since something has changed since the last good known configuration. Whenever you reboot the NFS server or some of the NFS processes are not running on the client or server or share is not properly exported at the server; these can be reasons for this error.
When does NFS server change the file handle?
Additionally, some NFS servers even change the file handle when a file is renamed, although this practice is discouraged. This error occurs even if a file or directory, with the same name, is recreated on the server without the client being aware of it.