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....
The log shows lustre client .lookup_nd failed with -13, and it looks quite possible to be inside kernel function reconnect_path() when it finds a disconnected dentry:
1. ->get_parent() found parent.
2. ->get_name() found child dentry name.
3. ->lookup_one_len() on parent for this name failed with -EACCES, MDS log shows it doesn't have EXEC right to parent.
I'm not clear of the cause yet, but first could you verify that the test user has EXEC access right to all directories in "/dls/p45/data/2015/cm12185-2/tmp/frederik-test/top_D19Rnh"?