Docker Containers with Unraid NFS: Fix Stale File Handle Errors

Originally published at kjetilfuras.com If you’re running Docker containers with Unraid NFS shares, or any server serving NFS shares, you’ve probably encountered the “stale file handle” problem. I’m running Proxmox as my hypervisor with multiple VMs: one running Unraid as my NAS, and another running my media stack (Plex, Radarr, Sonarr, etc.) in Docker containers. The Docker VM pulls media from Unraid via NFS. Everything worked fine—until Unraid rebooted or the network hiccuped. The containers would keep running, but they’d lose access to the media files. Plex would say “media unavailable,” and I’d have to manually restart every container. After trying way too many solutions (including building a whole systemd monitoring stack I later deleted), I finally figured out the simple fix. The Real Problem When Docker containers mount an NFS share and the NFS server goes away, they get stuck with “stale file handles.” Even when the mount comes back, the running containers can’t recover—they ne