nfs write problems

Bob Kryger bobk at panix.com
Tue Oct 2 19:56:41 UTC 2007


So, I have a relatively new system on which I am seeing strange NFS 
behavior.

In short I am getting seemingly random errors in files written via NFS.

    * I do not get the errors if I write files locally.
    * I have no errors in the NIC, I even tried a second NIC in a PCI
      slot as opposed to the onboard one. There are no errors recorded
      on the NIC or the switch on a 1Gb port.
    * I see no memory errors, I ran memtest for 3 days clean.
    * To test I am using dd if=/dev/zero of various (large) file sizes.
    * Since I know that the file should be all zeros I wrote a C program
      to read it back and tell me where it finds non-zero bytes. The
      program results are confirmed with od.
    * The files read back always have the errors in the same place, so
      it is not a problem with reading the files.
    * There are no errors in any logs.
    * The problem occurs on both the RAID1 (ext3) and RAID10 (xfs)
      filesystems.
    * I've tried two clients, both FC5 one 64bit, and the other a 32 bit
      with the same results. This error was uncovered by users
      attempting to write files from other systems and other Fedora
      releases, so it is repeatable regardless of the client.
    * the server is not running anything else and spends a large portion
      of the time idle. loadaverages are quite low. swap is mostly
      unused. a large portion of RAM is allocated to file cache, but I
      expect that this would be normal for this amount of file IO.

The server is running an up-to-date FC6, although this also occurred 
with FC5. I am about to try F7.

Hardware is an AMD 1220 dual core 64bit, on a Tyan K8SSA S3950
with an Adaptec Raid 2230SLP and 7 Fujitsu MAU3147NC.
The RAID config is that 1 disks (on diff channels) are in a Mirror for 
the OS, 4 are in a Raid 10 config and 1 is a hot spare.

Anyone ever seen anything like this before?
Suggest where I might look next?
Additional tests?




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