On Tue, 4 Jan 2005, Bastiaan Welmers wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm experiencing very annoying NFS problems with NetBSD.
>
> It happens often that a mounted NFS share just breaks down, for a reason
> that I cannot understand, because the connection is still up, I can ping,
> ftp, telnet whatever between the two computers, but the NFS connection went
> completely dead. Every process using the share turns into a zombie and can't
> even be killed. umount -f does not work (and turns into a non-killable
> zombie). Only solution is to hard-reboot the computer (can't even be
> rebooted by the "reboot" commando, just hangs at the shutdown scripts).
>
> Another day the nfs share works without problems.
>
> Is there something that can be done to avoid this (in particular the
> aggravating zombie behavior) ? I tried
> something with time-out values but the error still returns.
>
> This happens between two netbsd boxes, versions 1.6, 2.0 every combination.
>
> Thanks for reply,
>
> Bastiaan Welmers
>

I had something similar to this a long time ago.  My problem turned out to
be a dying ethernet card.  What does "netstat -I <your_eth_device>" tell
you?

-Scott Zahn