[lug] strange nfs behavior

[Stroud James]

I am having strange behavior with my nfs from our sgi machines (exporting)
onto our linux machines (mounting). Under certain circumstances the linux
machines fail to see certain files. For example, if in tcsh

structure 66% ls
total 4
   0 dbate/     0 han/     4 stroud/     0 lin/
structure 67% echo *
dbate han lin

Notice how stroud (me, unfortunately) is missing in the ehco. csh has
similar behavior. However bash works fine in this case:

[adm at structure chn]$ ls
dbate  han  stroud  lin
[adm at structure chn]$ echo *
dbate han stroud lin

(some names have been changed to protect the innocent)

Here I exist in both cases, thankfully. This is not an isolated
phenomenon. I find many files that display this behavior. Also there seems
to be subclasses within this phenomenon. For instance, 'ls' will display
all, 'echo *' will display less than 'ls' and a mozilla window will
display only a subset from the 'echo *' You may suggest to just stick with
bash. For me that would be okay, but to the innocents (non-administrative
types), learning a new shell is impractical--if you are an administrator
you will understand how regular-old users, perhaps justifiably so, resist
learning new ways to use computers. And also, we all must use mozilla and
other browsers for accessing log files produced in html.

I should also point out that Mandrake 8.2 seems better behaved in csh
behavior than Redhat 7.1 (less missing entries), but Mandrake 8.2 is worse
in its mozilla behavior (more missing entries).

So, my question is whether this is a problem with linux or a problem with
with the way sgi exports its file systems? Also, is there a way to get
csh, bash, tcsh, mozilla, etc., on the same page by renaming a library or
something?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

James

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James Stroud
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309
USA
Tel: 303-492-4503
Fax: 303-735-1347
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