CIFS failover share mounted but unavailable on one node

Products

• CA Privileged Access Manager (PAM)

Issue/Introduction

We are using the same CIFS share as failover session recording share on two nodes in a secondary cluster site. One node shows the share as mounted and available. The other node shows it as mounted as well, but unavailable. We tried unmounting and mounting again, but the result always is the same. Given that the other node has no problem, we don't see how the problem could be with the share itself.

Environment

Privileged Access Manager, all versions

Cause

PAM uses shared memory segments to keep track of mounted share status, one segment per share. It has been observed a couple of times that the shared memory segment got into a bad state, causing the availability check to fail even though the share in fact was mounted and files could be read from and written to it by PAM.

Resolution

If this problem persists after unmounting and mounting the share, rebooting the PAM node should resolve the problem. In a cluster environment, put the node into maintenance mode, wait for user activity to go down, and then reboot the node. Once it's back up and the share status looks good, take the node out of maintenance mode.