1.103. nfs-utils

An updated nfs-utils package that fixes various bugs and adds one enhancement is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

The nfs-utils package provides a daemon for the kernel Network File System (NFS) server, and related tools such as the mount.nfs, umount.nfs, and showmount programs.

This update fixes the following bugs:

* With an automounter in use, mounting a large number of NFS file systems (that is, 500 and more) over the TCP protocol at the same time caused the process to run out of privileged ports. Consequent to this, many of these mount attempts may have failed with an error message written to the system log. This update applies a patch to wait for a period of time specified by the "retry=" option before attempting to establish a connection with the NFS mount daemon again. (BZ#240790)

* Due to an error in the RPM spec file, the rpc.statd daemon may have been incorrectly running as the root user. This error has been fixed so that rpc.statd now runs as rpcuser. (BZ#495066)

* By providing the "-d" command line option, the rpc.gssd daemon allows a user to specify a directory or directories in which to look for Kerberos credential files. Previously, an attempt to specify a value other than "/tmp" caused the daemon to fail with the following error:

rpc.gssd: ccachedir path name too long

With this update, this error no longer occurs, and the "-d" option can now be used as expected. (BZ#498134)

* Due to an error in the RPM spec file, the nfsnobody user was assigned a different UID and GID on 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. This error has been fixed, and the nfsnobody user is now created with UID and GID 65534 on both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. (BZ#511876)

* When an NFS file system was mounted over the UDP protocol from a server that did not allow the use of the TCP protocol, an attempt to unmount it failed, because the umount.nfs utility incorrectly used TCP. With this update, a patch has been applied to address this issue so that umount.nfs no longer uses an incorrect protocol. (BZ#513466)

* Previously, the nfs and nfslock init scripts incorrectly returned exit code 0 even when the respective service was stopped. This update corrects this error, and when the corresponding service is stopped, these init scripts now return a non-zero exit code as expected. (BZ#534133, BZ#542020)

* The NFS mount daemon allows a user to disable a particular version of the NFS protocol by changing the value of the "MOUNTD_NFS_V1" option in the /etc/sysconfig/nfs configuration file to "no". Previously, an attempt to unmount a shared file system from a server with such configuration failed with an error. This update applies a patch that addresses this issue so that shared file systems can now be unmounted as expected. (BZ#595675)

* Prior to this update, running "nfsstat -s -o rpc" command produced output with incorrect labels in a table header. With this update, the underlying source code has been adapted to make sure that all columns now have the correct name. (BZ#617669)

As well, this update adds the following enhancement:

* The mount.nfs4 utility has been updated to provide a new mount option, "lookupcache=", which allows the NFS client to control how it caches files and directories. (BZ#511312)

All users of nfs-utils are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which fixes these bugs and adds this enhancement.