> About once a week, sometimes under heavy usage, sometimes not, my server
> will hang during
> NFS server activity: it only happens during NFS service.  Either client
> can precipitate
> the server hang.  But I cannot reproduce this at will with heavy NFS
> traffic.  These are
> home machines in a mostly quiet network (just me and my wife).

Sounds familiar. In my case it was a PPro machine overdrive'd and serving
sources via rsync to nine machines -- all of which were slower than it.

It turned out to be a compatibility problem in the BIOS -- at some speeds
the BIOS would get confused by the overdrive and run the CPU interface at
a higher frequency than it should have. So it was just as if I'd been
overclocking it like a PC d00d.

Jumpering down the motherboard so the BIOS didn't screw up was only the
first step however; to get the failures to completely disappear I had to
let everything "charge down" by unplugging all the external power sources
and having it sit for a while. It was really frustrating to finally learn
that half of my experiments had been useless because I didn't do the
"charge down" often enough.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com