FreeBSD NFS client and Netware 6.5 NFS server

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Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2005 16:24:02 -0500
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org

Message below is about a FreeBSD server I maintain. The FreeBSD server
is our web server. We use NFS to talk to a Netware file server where
most of our users' web pages are stored. FreeBSD is 5.3, and was
working ok with Netware 5.1 (and still is with other Netware servers).
One of the servers was recently upgraded to Netware 6.5 and NFS is no
longer playing nice between the two.

When something on the Netware side updates a file by copying it into
place (e.g. using FTP [don't complain] to upload a file), the FreeBSD
client doesn't find out that the file contents have changed until it
does something to the file (e.g. touch or chmod). Thus, when one of our
users updates their web page with something like Dreamweaver, the web
server doesn't find out about it (perhaps it eventually finds out, but
it takes more than the several minutes we waited).

As explained in the message below, a trace of the NFS server activity
shows that the FreeBSD client implements ls -l as a series of <ACCESS>
operations (whatever that is) followed by an <FS STAT>, while a Solaris
client does a series of <GET ATTR> operations (those are the Netware
abbreviations for the operations). The Solaris client does not exhibit
any of these problems. I don't know if that is meaningful with regard
to this problem, but clearly the Solaris client is doing things very
differently than the FreeBSD client.

Any (useful) suggestions about how to fix this? We've tried turning
nfs_lockd and nfs_statd on and off on the client, we've tried both NFSv2
and NFSv3 (only v2 worked with the older Netware server), and a few
other things that I don't remember.

One of our other servers running FreeBSD 4.7 exhibits the same problem
with Netware 6.5 NFS. Netware says they've tested their NFS server
against FreeBSD 4.7 and that it works ok, so perhaps this should be
treated as a Netware bug, but if anyone can suggest a quick way to make
them play together it will be very much appreciated.

Thanks,

- Bob

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: netware 6.5 nfs
Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2005 15:51:31 -0500
From: Shawn
To: Bob

I've posted the following to a netware 6.5 support forum.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
POST #1
----------------------------------------------------------------------
I just upgraded a netware 5.1 server to netware 6.5 overlay CD2 and am
having problems with NFAU to a FreeBSD workstation.

On a Windows workstation connected to the netware server with a drive
mapping, if you edit files through the drive mapping (and subsequently
save them directly to the volume) you immediately see the file changes
at the FreeBSD mount point.

However, if you edit and save the file on your local workstation and
then copy the file over to the volume (the mapped drive), the FreeBSD
system does not see the change in the file (I guess its NFS cache is not
updating). If, on the FreeBSD system you touch (or chmod/chown) the
file the cache gets updated and you see that the file has been updated.

This was not a problem with NFAU under netware 5.1.

Has anyone else seen this problem and/or have any possible things to
look at tuning (I'm hoping someone has a cache setting to switch). (Am
I even explaining this so it's understandable what's happening?)

Before you ask, this is FreeBSD 5.3 (and I see that NFAU wasn't tested
with this version)... I'm just holding out that there is something that
can be done.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
POST #2
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Here's some more information. Turns out it works just dandy if the
volume gets mounted on a Solaris 8 workstation. I've done an NFS trace
to see what is happening differently. The results of an 'ls' command on
the Solaris workstation are:

100003.3.01 <GET ATTR> [TCP <SOLARIS-IP>] RStatus 0 Accept 0 NFS 0

And on the FreeBSD workstation the results are:

100003.3.04 <ACCESS> [TCP <FREEBSD-IP>] RStatus 0 Accept 0 NFS 0
100003.3.18 <FS STAT> [TCP <FREEBSD-IP>] RStatus 0 Accept 0 NFS 0

It has one 100003.3.01 or 100003.3.04 line for each file/dir in the
directory where the 'ls' command happens... only one 100003.3.18 line
per 'ls' command however. So the two NFS servers are doing something
differently... just what and how to correct?

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