Big autofs trouble

[Alex Schuster]

Hi there!

One of our hosts sometimes has trouble with autofs. It happened in the 
past, then the problem was suddenly gone, but now, after a reboot, it 
appeared again.

ls /home/ shows many home directories, but not mine. And non of them is 
accessible: No such file or directory.

Whenever I try to access a home directory, I get this message in syslog:
  svc: failed to register lockdv1 RPC service (errno 13).
Google does nto find much about this.

Other observations: The nfs-kernel-server does not start. NIS is running, 
but restarting the nis service fails. When I then restart autofs, even a 
'ls' in a local directory hangs, and gives the output only after a few 
minutes. route also becomes slow then, and takes long until showing the 
default route. SSH logins no longer work then. And /home is deleted. It 
was empty anyway, populated by autofs stuf fonly, but now even the 
directory itself is gone.

Any idea what that might be? I have none at all. Any help on this is much 
appreciated.

There are three other systems in the LAN, one being exactly the same 
hardware, they are clones of the machine with differences only in network 
setup. And they are not affected. These systems are running Ubuntu 9.10 
server.

/etc/auto.master has '/home   yp:auto.home' as only entry.

	Wonko