i believe i mentioned this issue to russ some time ago: when mntgen is used behind exportfs, the mount points get "lost", as exportfs does not hold an open file descriptor for each directory that has been walked to by its clients, so walking to a file below the mount point results in mntgen creating a new mountpoint with a new qid, so "forgetting" the old mount. reproduce the problem with: mkdir /tmp/mnttest mntgen /tmp/mnttestsrvfs srvfs mnttest /tmp/mnttest [in another window] mount /srv/mnttest /tmp bind /dev /tmp/blah ls -l /tmp/blah a deeper fix might change the plan 9 kernel to allow user processes to hold file descriptors that are not yet open (but may be walked). that fix doesn't seem so likely in the near future (and it's not a great problem for anything else), so this fix changes mntgen so it always generates the same qid (60 bits of md5sum) for a given mountpoint name, thus avoiding the problem. it's a small enough change that i hope it can be accepted for the time being, even if it is only an interim solution to a deeper problem...