[rescue] Happy New Year! RIP, Sun/Solaris...

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Tuesday, January 04, 2011, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> On 01/04/11 21:19, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
> > The kernel NFS server crashes and cause random disconnects of USB
> > disks, so in effect if you want to keep your data, you can not NFS
> > share a USB disk.
> > 
> > The user space NFS server works without crashing, but does not
> > support directory searching, file locking and sharing properly, so
> > you can't use it as a source or target for rsync and I have
> > directories randomly "dissapear" to the clients until the user
> > which used files in them logs off.
> 
> So in short, "No, nfsd on Linux still sucks ten years later."  Come
> on, people, it's not like you haven't had time to fix it...

No, I think is more like "USB still sucks. Take the drive out of the 
enclosure and place it on a real SATA controller."  I'm not sure that 
NFS is much better now than 5 years ago, but I (work) never hit problems 
until we had around 150-200 clients beating up a single NFS server 
(we've now passed 4800 clients on our current NFS home directory 
servers).  For most people lacking gargantuan scaling requirements, it 
works fine.

Geoff, have you tried this with more than one type of USB external disk 
(and more than one controller chipset)?  Some USB device chipsets suck 
pretty badly.. I wouldn't be surprised if the kernel was hammering the 
device with requests, causing the problem.

There's a reason that you don't see people hooking USB disks up to their 
company's NAS to share data.

Pat
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