Joshua,
Thanks for the info on the nfs server in RH9. We are using that
distro unmodified out of the box, so to speak, so that is clearly
blocks any possibility for fixing the problem in software. As for
the hardware, it was described earlier as follows:
[Old hardware generally: AMD Athlon 32-bit single (MSI KT4V) and dual
(Tyan...) chip motherboards both running Redhat 9 one with the
2.4.20-8 kernels, though one is the smp version; NetGear GA311 NICs;
and a NetGear GS108 8 port Copper 1 GB/s switch. The single
processor motherboards have 32-bit PCI slots so their network speeds
are limited to 300 kbps as shown by netpipe. All of the LEDs at the
ends of the cables show 1000Mb connections.]
Thanks again for your help.
Mike
At 10:26 AM 12/5/2007, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
On Wed, 5 Dec 2007 at 9:55am, Michael H. Frese wrote
Clearly, this puts a premium on using tcp for nfs. All our
attempts to do that failed. Well, both of them, anyway. In the
first one, we unmounted the offending disk, modified its fstab
entry, and remounted it. We were pretty careful in the second one,
where we added tcp to the fstab argument, unmounted all the remote
disks, restarted all the nfsd's, and did 'mount -a'. We got an
error message in both cases that didn't obviously refer to the tcp
argument, but the mount didn't happen. As I write this, I see
references to tcp mount requests in the mountd man page, so maybe
we need to do a bit more here.
The Wikipedia article on nfs says this: "At the time of
introduction of Version 3, vendor support for TCP as a
transport-layer protocol began increasing. While several vendors
had already added support for NFS Version 2 with TCP as a
transport, Sun Microsystems added support for TCP as a transport
for NFS at the same time it added support for Version 3."
I'd like to know what version of nfs this server supports, but the
man page on nfsd doesn't say. The man page on rpc.mountd says that
it supports nfs version 2 and version 3, but that "If the NFS
kernel module was compiled without support for NFSv3, rpc.mountd
must be invoked with the option --no-nfs-version 3." Yet the
/proc/procnum/cmdline for the running rpc.mountd doesn't show a
--no-nfs-version argument. Clearly, both the kernel and the server
need to support the use of tcp.
Looking back through this thread, I don't see any details on the NFS
server, only the clients. What are the hardware and OS version of
the NFS server?
Grepping through the kernel config for RH9 shows it definitely did
not support NFS over TCP *as a server*. If your server is newer,
though, and does support a TCP nfsd, then you may have to look at
other stuff (firewalls rules, TCP wrappers, etc) as to why the TCP
mounts didn't work.
--
Joshua Baker-LePain
QB3 Shared Cluster Sysadmin
UCSF
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