Poudriere errors: Stale NFS file handle

[Josh Cepek]

We've been using Poudriere for several months to prepare pkg repos for
internal systems. Overall the build process works well, but builds
sometimes fail citing a "Stale NFS file handle" during the packaging
phase.

Our logs are stored on a disk local to the build host, but the
"packages/" directory is a symlink to an NFS-mounted resource. We also
use this NFS mount to do daily syncs of the FreeBSD ports and base SVN
trees, and this has never encountered NFS-related problems; Poudriere on
the other hand seems to encounter issues rather frequently.

Here's a sample of the build failure, under the "phase: package"
section:

mount: /pkg/poudriere/data/build/93amd64-r363279-router/04/new_packages: Stale NFS file handle
===>  Building package for postgresql92-client-9.2.8_2
rm: /new_packages/databases/postgresql*.txz: Stale NFS file handle
*** [do-package] Error code 1

Usually re-running the same failed poudriere command again will fix it
(rinse/repeat until it completes.) These errors seem to occur randomly,
on small and large builds alike.

Has anyone else seen this, or have suggestions on where to look?

Thanks,

--
Josh