possible cause of horrifically unreliable NFS?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i have a small embedded ARM board and i'm trying to boot it off via
an NFS mount point sitting on my fedora 9 system.  i thought i set up
NFS properly in terms of exporting a (debian flavour) root fs but,
when i boot, i get numerous diagnostic msgs of the form:

VFS: Mounted root (nfs filesystem).
Freeing init memory: 112K
nfs: server 192.168.1.241 not responding, still trying
nfs: server 192.168.1.241 OK
nfs: server 192.168.1.241 not responding, still trying
nfs: server 192.168.1.241 OK
... etc etc ...

  i'm asking on this list since it's the fedora system that's acting
as the NFS server.  if i try to do a normal NFS mount, i'll get a
couple *pages* of those messages and finally a hung embedded system.

  when i tried to simplify things with "init=/bin/sh", i got only a
few lines and, finally, a booted system:

sh-2.05b# mount
192.168.1.241:/home/rpjday/ts7250/rootfs/tmp/mnt on / type nfs (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,default)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620,gid=5,mode=620)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
usbfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)
#

  what is the most common cause of NFS bouncing back and forth between
OK and "not responding"?  should i be messing with the mount options?
read and write sizes or something? it's a 2.6.21 kernel.  thanks.

rday
--

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Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry:
    Have classroom, will lecture.

http://crashcourse.ca                          Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
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