[gamin] gam_server trying to access non-existence files in /home

["Reuben D. Budiardja" <techlist pathfinder phys utk edu>]

Hello,

In my LAN I have a server in which all the /home for users reside. The /home 
is shared via NFS. The server also as a NIS server. The server is running 
Centos 4.1. 
Other machines (including my desktop) in the LAN mount the /home from the 
server, using automount. 
Here is /etc/auto.master:
/home /etc/auto.home

and /etc/auto.home:
* -rw,intr,soft,timeo=300,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768      server1:/home/&

Sometimes ago, and this has been happening since, I noticed some oddities in 
my NFS server. In fact I asked about this on Fedora-List about it but got no 
respond:http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=fedora-list&m=113827738925694&w=2 

Basically the problem was my NFS server has been getting lots of hits by 
mount request from my desktop, for non existence files. The log of the NFS 
server showes, for example:

Mar 25 14:48:00 server1 rpc.mountd: authenticated mount request from 
desktop1.localdomain:769 for /home/format (/home)
Mar 25 14:48:00 server1 rpc.mountd: can't stat exported dir /home/format: No 
such file or directory
Mar 25 14:48:01 server1 rpc.mountd: authenticated mount request from 
desktop1.localdomain:773 for /home/format (/home)
Mar 25 14:48:01 server1 rpc.mountd: can't stat exported dir /home/format: No 
such file or directory

My desktop is running FC4. It turns out that this is caused by a process 
called gam_server. Once in a while, after opening some application, (eg. 
GIMP, but it could be anything else), I would notice increased disk 
activities on the desktop while nothing obvious is happening. Then if I check 
my /var/log/message and the /var/log/message of the NFS server, I see the NFS 
requests hitting the server as I mentioned above. When I kill the gam_server 
process, everything would be fine again, and gam_server restarts itself with 
different PID. 

So my question is, why does gam_server try to poll non-existence files 
in /home ? Sometimes what gam_server tries to poll seems very random, for 
example this morning I saw it tried to poll /home/mmk, /home/.directory, etc. 
I don't even know where it came up with those. Is this a problem with 
gam_server, or a problem with my configuration ? Is there anything I can do 
to stop this ? 

Thank you for any help.
RDB
-- 
Reuben D. Budiardja
Dept. Physics and Astronomy
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN