afs: Lost contact with file server

[Peter Wienemann]

Using the OpenAFS packages shipped with Ubuntu 16.04 (1.6.15-1ubuntu1), I occasionally observe

afs: Lost contact with file server x.x.x.x in cell example.com (code -13) (all multi-homed ip addresses down for the server)

errors on AFS client machines. From a user's point of view this leads to "Connection timed out" errors when trying to access files on AFS. I was not able to find any indication that this is due to networking problems. I do not observe those problems on AFS client machines running Scientific Linux which access the same servers. After switching to the packages by Anders Kaseorg from the OpenAFS PPA https://launchpad.net/~openafs/+archive/ubuntu/stable (1.6.20-1ppa1~ubuntu16.04.1) the "lost contact" errors disappeared. Thus it seems to me that the packages from the universe repository do not work reliably.

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

Since openafs 1.6.20-2ubuntu1 in Ubuntu 17.04 includes the updates from 1.6.20-1ppa1, I assume this is fixed in Ubuntu 17.04.

[Peter Wienemann (wienemann)]

Would it be possible to get this fix also for Ubuntu 16.04?

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

Very unlikely, based on my own experience trying to get Ubuntu to accept a stable release update for the much more serious bug 1206387, but if you want to try, the process is documented at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates.