Q: Why is my file server hosed? The load is high and rpc.mountd is taking up large hunks of the CPU.\
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A: There is a file called /etc/rmtab, which contains statistics about remotes mounts. See section rmtab(5) for details. When an NFS client crashes, it does not remove its entry in this file and so as more NFS clients crash, the file /etc/rmtab on the file server will grow without bound. Eventually things break or slow down severely. Notable symptoms are:\
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1. The file /etc/rmtab is large--there should only be one line for each NFS client mounting a file system.\
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2. High %CPU (e.g. higher than any other process) value as shown by ps -aux:\
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\f1\fs24 nfsserver%
\b ps -aux | grep mount
\b0 \
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSIZE RSIZE TT STAT TIME COMMAND\
root 276 19.6 1.4 1.23M 224K ? S 0:00 rpc.mountd\
\f0\fs28 ...\
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3. High load values on the server immediately following multiuser boot.\
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4. People's home directories not mounting properly.\