Stale NFS file handle error

Stale NFS file handle error

Recently I went through this stale error because of miscommunication between NFS server and client. This error is typically seen on a client system which has active NFS mount point. The NFS client doesn't know how to communicate for any change of NFS server configuration.

For example, assume the NFS mount point is /nfstestdir and error would be occurred as

df -k

drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4096 2009-01-06 16:35 usr
drwxr-xr-x 24 root root 4096 2009-01-06 16:51 var
ls: cannot access nfsdir: Stale NFS file handle
[root@test1 /]#

Now just unmount the NFS volume forcefully using -f

[root@test1 /]# umount -f /nfstestdir

Remount it again using following command

[root@test1 /]# mount nfsserver:/nfstestdir /nfstestdir -t nfs

Have a nice day!