A quick update to say sles15sp1 is acting the same. Linux (none) 4.12.14-195-default #1 SMP Tue May 7 10:55:11 UTC 2019 (8fba516) aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux For the below, I'm going to turn off ganesha and turn back on gluster nfs. I'll collect the packet trace and will see if I can turn on some nfs debugging in gluster too. I'll report back. I'll go back to rhel76 so it's apples-to-apples with what you looked at before.
Okay ,so with this info, I was able to trace through the log and the pcap, and everything in them work fine. su is found and loaded (involving finding and loading a lot of libraries, and some login related stuff like PAM and timezone), and the last thing done in both the pcap and the log is to look up /home. This succeeds, returning a file handle and attributes, including a mode of 555. There's no errors that aren't looking up libraries in the wrong place (it uses the library path), so it should be fine.
The only thing I can see is that it tries to open /dev/tty and fails. However, that's very early in the process, and it continues for a long time after that, so I'm not sure that is causing it to fail. It never gets to trying to lookup /home/erikj, it just stops at /home.
I'm a bit stumped at this point. Maybe a packet trace of a working run of the same thing would be helpful for comparison?
Daniel