Filr clustered deployment does not work after first re-boot due to missing /vashare

  • 7017379
  • 17-Mar-2016
  • 17-Mar-2016

Environment

Novell Filr 2.0

Situation

When setting up a clustered Filr deployment for the first time which uses a NFS Share for the /vashare disk, the Filr appliance works fine until the first time it is re-booted. After the first re-boot, Filr is no longer accessible and errors like this may appear in the Filr appserver.log file suggesting that there is a problem accessing the /vashare disk:

Caused by: java.io.FileNotFoundException: Shared config file '/vashare/filr/conf/memcached.properties' does not exist

For an end user, trying to access Filr via the web browser the following generic error message may be displayed which indicates that there was an initialization problem when Filr was starting up and the startup failed (the real cause for failure is indicated by the error logged in the Filr appserver.log noted above):

HTTP Status 500 - Error creating bean with name 'sPropsUtil' defined in ServletContext Resource ...

Resolution

A permanent fix for this is under investigation and likely to be available in the next release of Filr. Until then, you may use the following workarounds with your Filr 2.0 Clustered deployment:
  1. Do not use a NFS Share path that is set to a sub-folder within the /var directory on your remote Linux server.
  2. If you must use a NFS Share path that is within the /var directory such as /var/opt/FilrVAShare, then follow these steps:
    • Edit /etc/fstab and add an entry for the NFS Share
      For example: nfs-server.mycompany.com:/var/opt/FilrVAShare /vashare nfs defaults 0 0
    • Save your changes to /etc/fstab and issue the command:
      mount -a
    • Restart the Filr service from command line:
      rcfilr restart

Cause

While there could be several reasons for the /vashare disk to not mount, in this particular instance it was found that the NFS Share path used on the remote Linux server was set to a subfolder within /var directory. For example, /var/opt/FilrVAShare. Using any NFS Share path under the /var directory was found to be the main cause for the disappearing /vashare disk when Filr appliance was re-booted.

You can verify this by looking at /etc/fstab and noticing that a record for the /vashare does not exist.

Status

Reported to Engineering

Additional Information

More information about setting up a Remote NFS Share is available in the Filr documentation:
Setting Up Remote NFS for the Filr Shared Storage Location

If you have questions or would like assistance related to this issue, please contact Novell Technical Support with reference to this TID.