Debian – How to resolve a stale nfs handle

Using any mount system, you want to avoid situations where Nautilus lists the directory containing a mount that may or not be mounted. So, with autofs, don't create mounts in, for instance, /nfs. If you do, when you use Nautilus to list the 'File System' it will try to create whatever mounts should exist in /nfs, and if those mount attempts fail it takes minutes to give up.

So what I did was change auto.master to create the mounts in /nfs/mnt.

This fixed the problem for me. I only get a long delay if I try to list the contents of /nfs/mnt, which I can easily avoid.

The real answer to fixing stale NFS file handles is doing mount -o remount. But ideally, instead you'll track down what's making the changes to the file system, as that's what's causing this in the first place.