Apologies, this ticket got created early, I'll put my information in this comment as I can't edit the original description...
Our users are reporting intermittent permission denied problems when accessing directory on lustre over NFS. They trying to change to a directory returns permission denied and when retrying a few minutes later it is permitted. As far as I can tell nothing modifies the directory in the mean time. There are no problems of this sort when using native Lustre clients.
For one user this seems to happen when creating directories over NFS with mode 0700 but not (or much less frequently) when using a more permissive mode like 0755 for the directories. In this case we have a reproducer, which I'll attach. The reproducer creates directories below your current directory and attempts to write one file per directory. It will report permission denied eventually when we run it, depending on the file system we are trying it on, we need to run the reproducer with a different directory count to reproduce the problem.
This is a sample output for a failing case:
Reports from other users are less clear, so there might be other failing cases.
I will try to run the reproducer with debug enabled on the NFS server/lustre client and the MDS server on our test file system....
Also, we are receiving an increasing number of reports from users who are trying to access files and directories written days ago and are receiving intermittent permission denied (for example when running ls). This is obviously much harder to debug as we are not (yet) able to reproduce at will...