[rescue] bootp and dhcp - conflict?

[Mouse]

>>> All's good now, net booting like a pro with slowest speeds ever,
>>> anyone happen to have some magical nfs parameters that makes this
>>> faster?
>> Biggest impact on speed will probably be wsize=16384,rsize=16384

Yes and no.

I've seen cases where smaller rsize/wsize help; I've seen cases where
bigger rsize/wsize help.

I even saw one case where rsize=1024 made it work whereas the defaults
caused _some_ reads to hang forever.  In that case it was partially an
underlying network issue.  (The server could handle 60-octet packets;
the client would drop anything shorter than 64 octets.  Ethernet, IP,
and UDP headers would push a packet over 64, but the last frag of a
fragmented packet could be <64 octets, in which case the server would
send it, the client hardware would drop it, IP reassembly timed out,
repeat forever.  With rsize=1024, data packets never got fragmented.)

In the case at hand here, large wsize and rsize could actually break
things in a different way.  If the client network is slower than the
server (eg, a 10Mb SPARCstation served by something running gigabit), a
many-fragment packet can consistently lose a fragment to lack of
buffering in the intervening network.  rsize=16384 leads to at least 11
frags (possibly more; I haven't done the detailed arithmetic, but the
payload alone forces at least 11 frags), which, depending on the
infrastructure, could well lead to at least one of them getting
consistently dropped when the fast sender overruns the slow consumer.

Though, technically, I suppose that _would_ have a big impact on speed.
Just not the kind of impact you want. :-)

As for the original speed issue, the first thing I'd try is tcpdumping
on both the client and the server, then comparing the captures to see
if anything is getting lost.  (Or etherfind or whatever, if one or both
are running OSes without tcpdump.)

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