Quoting Dave Toal (dave_toal@t-t.com):
We have a problem with files disappearing from a filer.
...
idsmajor:root:/mnt/etc>mount -p | grep /tmp/a sanihome:/vol/nfs_archive - /tmp/a nfs - no rw
...
What operating systems are mounting the filer? Mounting filesystems that you care about in /tmp is generally a bad idea, as various OS flavors may try to randomly delete things since they view it as temporary space.
For instance, numerous Linux Red Hat distributions (4.1 among them, not sure about the newer ones) have shipped with the following in /etc/crontab:
# Remove /tmp, /var/tmp files not accessed in 10 days (240 hours) 41 02 * * * root /usr/sbin/tmpwatch 240 /tmp /var/tmp
Naturally, a great deal of damage can occur from this sort of script, depending on the modes of the files, export permissions on the NFS server, etc. If this is your problem, you wouldn't be the first! Snapshots save the day in this scenario, if they are not disabled....
Paul Eastham NetApp Engineering