[ILUG] Filesystem mysteriously mounting read-only

[Niall O Broin]

I have a filesystem on a box running SuSE 8.0 (2.4.18) which shares a couple 
of large filesystems via NFS. It's been behaving itself quite nicely for the 
last 273 days. Suddenly, weird things are happening on one of these 
filesystems - it suddenly becomes unwritable because it's mounted read-only. 
Attempting to do    mount -o remount,rw FILESYSTEM   fails with a message 
that the filesystem is write protected and hence is being mounted read-only.

The easy enough fix is to stop the NFS server, umount the filesystem , mount 
the filesystem  and start the NFS server again, which doesn't bother the 
clients a whole lot (although VMWare 'doze instances on clients get 
temporarily VERY sad) but I'm wondering what the hell causes this. ls -lu on 
/bin/mount shows that it hasn't been used for hours, so it's not a wayward 
script or something. 




Niall