Tru64 NFS server problems with recent Linux NFS clients

From: Ole Holm Nielsen (Ole.H.Nielsen_at_fysik.dtu.dk)
Date: 08/08/05

  • Next message: Christian Wessely: "Problem booting Alpha 8200" 
    Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2005 12:10:55 +0200
To: tru64-unix-managers@ornl.gov

    We have an Alphaserver DS25 NFS fileserver running Tru64 UNIX v5.1B
    Patch Kit 4 (we will upgrade to PK5 shortly). In recent months
    we've been having some serious NFS problems on many Linux clients,
    since we started upgrading them to the latest Linux versions
    such as Redhat RHEL 4.0 and Centos 4.1 (all running the Linux
    kernel version 2.6):

    Too often the NFS client hangs waiting in NFS I/O on the users'
    home directory, as soon as the user logs in to the graphical
    desktop (GNOME or KDE). Removing the user's GNOME or KDE
    setup and rebooting the NFS client will in many cases solve
    the problem, but the apperance of the problem seems to be
    erratic and irreproducible. If the client is turned off
    for some minutes the problem sometimes goes away, so there
    may be a timeout factor involved. There is nothing in
    the Tru64 server's /var/adm/messages which points to any errors.

    Older Linux NFS clients running the Linux kernel 2.4 have
    no such problems with this particular server.

    We suspect that some new features in the Linux kernel 2.6
    and/or GNOME and KDE is triggering a bug in the Tru64 UNIX
    NFS server. We have not heard of similar problems with
    Linux NFS servers.

    Question:
    Has someone else got experience with Tru64 NFS servers and
    Linux NFS clients (recent kernel 2.6 versions only) ?
    Is there a workaround or patch which solves this NFS problem ?

    Thanks a lot,
    Ole Holm Nielsen
    Department of Physics, Technical University of Denmark

  • Next message: Christian Wessely: "Problem booting Alpha 8200"

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