Under Ubuntu 12.04, landscape-client causes all autofs-managed mount points to become mounted every five minutes (during compilation of mount information snapshots). This places an undue burden on network and fileservers. It also prevents the mounts being unmounted automatically.
This behaviour is due to patch 5c8a0fbba543d9428a486f0d1282bbcf3cf1d95a to the kernel (http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git;a=commit;h=5c8a0fbba543d9428a486f0d1282bbcf3cf1d95a). This changed the behaviour of statfs to cause autofs-managed mount points to be mounted to return information about the filesystem (previously, only information about the mount location would be returned).
Two possible fixes come to mind:
- Add filtering into the get_mount_info function (landscape/lib/disk.py); autofs-mounted points which are not mounted have their 'device' field (column 1) recorded as 'auto_direct'. This should probably also filter out 'proc' and 'none' entries.
- Have the patch reverted from the kernel.
This bug is currently holding me back from rolling out Ubuntu 12.04; we have a large number of autofs-managed NFS mounts.
Thanks a lot for your detailed bug report!
We will work on the issue and figure out what the best way to deal with monitoring unmounted autofs mounts, but the fix might take a little while to be packaged and included in the official repositories for 12.04.
In the mean time, one way to work around the problem is to specify the list of monitor plugins to use in your landscape client config file (/etc/landscape
monitor_plugins = ActiveProcessInfo, ComputerInfo, HardwareInventory, LoadAverage, MemoryInfo, ProcessorInfo, Temperature, PackageMonitor, UserMonitor, RebootRequired, AptPreferences, NetworkActivity, NetworkDevice
For reference, this is the complete list of plugins, with the "MountInfo" plugin removed.
This furthermore made us realize some config options (such as this one) are missing from the man page - this is now tracked in #1045426