How a phantom ELOOP error led engineers to fix a hidden autofs dependency

In September, PHP cron jobs at app platform GoodBarber began failing with a 'Too many levels of symbolic links' error, despite no actual symlinks existing on the affected paths. The root cause traced back to autofs, a Linux automounting service, whose path traversals count against the kernel's symlink limit and can trigger ELOOP errors without any real symlink loop. Application code was already bind-mounted directly into the cron container, but the cron paths still routed through autofs, creating an unnecessary dependency on the same daemon managing NFS network shares. The failure was linked to an NFS incident that left the automounter in an unhealthy state, exposing the fragile configuration. Engineers resolved the issue on September 10 by adding direct Docker bind mounts at the paths the crons actually use and removing those entries from the automount map to eliminate the autofs dependency entirely.