Bug#832566: systemd-machined breaks automounting nfs shares

[John Pearson]

Package: systemd
Version: 215-17+deb8u4
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where appropriate ***

   * What led up to the situation?
Upgraded a Debian Wheezy system that uses automounted NFS home directories to Jessie

   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
     ineffective)?
Most mornings when a user first logs in, the system attempts to automount /nfs/home.

   * What was the outcome of this action?

Graphical logins are returned to the greeter screen immediately; ssh logins, or other attempts to access files under /nfs/home, report the message 

  Too many levels of symbolic links
  
   * What outcome did you expect instead?
/nfs/home should be automaticaly mounted by the automounter as required.


This appears to be fundamentally similar to Debian bug #767468i, assigned to cgmanager.

When the error occured this morning, I checked if any processes still listed /nfs/home as mounted:

  # grep /nfs/home /proc/*/mounts
  /proc/25319/mounts:files:/home /nfs/home nfs4 rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,vers=4.0,rsize=1048576,wsize=1048576,namlen=255,hard,proto=tcp,port=0,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,clientaddr=192.168.8.53,local_lock=none,addr=192.168.8.249 0 0
  /proc/25319/mounts:tmpfs /nfs/home tmpfs rw,nosuid,relatime,size=407436k,mode=755 0 0
  /proc/25319/mounts:tmpfs /nfs/home tmpfs ro,relatime,size=407436k,mode=755 0 0
  # ps afx | grep 25319
  26164 pts/2    S+     0:00          \_ grep 25319
  25319 ?        Ss     0:00 /lib/systemd/systemd-machined

Restarting autofs resolves the issue, but that requires administrator intervention and so is a poor solution on a shared workstation used by unprivileged staff.

-- Package-specific info:

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.5
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Foreign Architectures: amd64

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-686-pae (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages systemd depends on:
ii  acl             2.2.52-2
ii  adduser         3.113+nmu3
ii  initscripts     2.88dsf-59
ii  libacl1         2.2.52-2
ii  libaudit1       1:2.4-1+b1
ii  libblkid1       2.25.2-6
ii  libc6           2.19-18+deb8u4
ii  libcap2         1:2.24-8
ii  libcap2-bin     1:2.24-8
ii  libcryptsetup4  2:1.6.6-5
ii  libgcrypt20     1.6.3-2+deb8u1
ii  libkmod2        18-3
ii  liblzma5        5.1.1alpha+20120614-2+b3
ii  libpam0g        1.1.8-3.1+deb8u1+b1
ii  libselinux1     2.3-2
ii  libsystemd0     215-17+deb8u4
ii  mount           2.25.2-6
ii  sysv-rc         2.88dsf-59
ii  udev            215-17+deb8u4
ii  util-linux      2.25.2-6

Versions of packages systemd recommends:
ii  dbus            1.8.20-0+deb8u1
ii  libpam-systemd  215-17+deb8u4

Versions of packages systemd suggests:
pn  systemd-ui  <none>

-- no debconf information