Stale filehandles again

I thought I understood stale NFS filehandles: if you change the server
filesystem (eg. by copying files to a new drive) then your filehandles
will all change and you'll get stale filehandles. But I just had a
case where I had some stale filehandles without changing the server
filesystem, and I'm curious why.

The server and clients are all running CentOS 4.1 (a recompile of
RedHat Enterprise 4.1). I have several filesystems exported from the
server to the clients. When the server died last night (bug in lvm2
snapshots) the clients all (same behavior) were able to recover most
of the filesystems, but got stale filehandles on two of them. The
only thing similar about the two that failed is that they're rarely
(if ever) used by the users.

Given that fsck shouldn't screw with inode numbers or the filesystem
UUID or generation number, I'm really curious what happened to cause
two of the filesystems to break in this case. Any thoughts?

Damian Menscher
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