Re: NFS

[Jukka Marin <jmarin%embedtronics.fi@localhost>]

On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 02:10:06PM +0300, Jukka Marin wrote:
> I have been using a setup where my $HOME is located on a NetBSD NFS server
> (for 10+ years).  Every now and then something goes wrong with NFS and
> all accesses to /home cause the process enter disk wait (D in ps listing).
> No matter how long I wait, the disk wait never completes.  I can't even
> shutdown and reboot the client system properly because shutdown fails
> to unmount the NFS partition(s).  At the same time, all other NFS mounts
> from the same server work just fine.

It happened again.

After the last discussion, I changed /home to use NFS over TCP and it has
been working well so far.  Yesterday, another UDP mounted partition died
in the middle of a compilation process.  I couldn't umount the partition,
not even with umount -f.  When I ran shutdown -r, it killed a bunch of
processes and then - nothing.  I tried sync, it hang.  I tried reboot,
it didn't.  Even halt didn't do anything useful.

The only way to "fix" the dead NFS mount was hitting the reset button
(which forced a parity rewrite of a 1 TB raidframe disk and fsck of
several largish partitions).

I'm using TCP for all NFS mounts now.. we'll see if that helps.  It would
be great if one could get over an NFS problem without the reset button,
though....

  -jm