[geeks] An NFS conundrum

[Mike Meredith]

On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 14:25:00 -0500, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> oops...  good call.  lemme fix that and retry.

I'm good at spotting daft mistakes ... I get enough practise :) Latest
one: wondering what kind of hardware fault a StoreEdge 3510 JBOD had,
only to find out that I had jammed down the alert sound reset switch
when re-attaching the cosmetic ears (plastic covers for those nasty
looking things that attach to the rack).

> Yeah, that would probably stand some benchmarking.  I'm not certain
> how best to go about it to control for the effects of caching
> though.  Any suggestions?  I get enough throughput to almost saturate
> my network as it is.

Well bonnie++ is worth a go, but if you're almost saturating the
network it probably isn't worth the effort. It's just that you often
see 8K blocks used because of historical Linux problems which may
longer be relevant.

> The traffic across the firewall, as far as I can tell, looks
> completely normal, exactly as it should.  I've got minbar's nfsd
> running verbose, but still nothing's being logged there.  Meanwhile,
> the problem client is logging errors that say the nfs server isn't
> responding.  Kind of makes me think whatever's going wrong is going
> wrong entirely on the client side.

Do you get success when running 'rpcinfo -p minbar' and 'showmount -e
minbar' ? They're probably working if you can mount the volume, but
it's worth a go. It's also worth doing a packet dump from the client
whilst doing a mount, ls, umount to see if there's anything odd there
especially given your other message.

Is it worth trying to mount the volume on the client with
'proto=tcp' (or whatever the Linux option is for that) ? I'm running
out of ideas ... I don't get on well with NFS, and some of the biggest
dents in my desk at work have "NFS" written all over them.

> > my security fascist tendencies show :)
> 
> Oh yeah, sure.  Stipulated.  But basically anyone who's connected on
> that wireless segment is either a family member or a houseguest
> anyway.

Unfortunately it's a reflex reaction when I see that sort of thing ...
I don't always do the right thing at home. My wlan is currently too
open as far as the firewall rules go, but it seems to have disappeared
according to my phone.

-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
 Most politicians think that "ethics" is a county in the south of
England.