F12 NFS Failures

[John Austin]

On Sat, 2009-11-21 at 06:33 -0800, Antonio Olivares wrote:
> 
> --- On Sat, 11/21/09, John Austin <ja at jaa.org.uk> wrote:
> 
> > From: John Austin <ja at jaa.org.uk>
> > Subject: F12 NFS Failures
> > To: fedora-list at redhat.com
> > Date: Saturday, November 21, 2009, 2:09 AM
> > Hi
> > 
> > I have just completed a clean install of F12 and
> > subsequent yum update on a client machine.
> > NFS was used for the install - no problems !!
> > I am using a fully updated Centos 5.4 nfs server
> > 
> > When copying a large file (2.7GB) from the server to the
> > F12 m/c a complete freeze of the F12 machine occurs.
> > No mouse, keyboard, ssh login. 
> > Only hitting the Reset button gets it back.
> > 
> > F12 is installed on the only disk on the machine which has
> > several ext3
> > partitions. A fully updated F11 is on one of the
> > partitions
> > 
> > I have tried
> > 1. Changing from NFS4 to NFS3 - Still locks up
> > 2. scp the same file from the server to F12 no problem 
> > 3. md5sum on the file across the nfs mount - a read only? -
> > F12 freezes
> > 4. Booting the F11 partition and copying the same file - no
> > problems
> > 5. Tried playing with Defaultvers=4 in /etc/nfsmount.conf -
> > still locks
> > 
> > I have "googled" but not found anything useful so far
> > 
> > My understanding is that NFS code is in the kernel - is
> > that correct?
> > 
> > Has anyone seen this or has any ideas about the next move
> 
> 1) before doing anything, check the status of NFS, i.e, 
> 
> # service NFS status
> 
> 2), NFS is failing because something is not letting it run correctly.  I saw it in testing Fedora 12 rawhide days, on messages(bootup),

> so it could be that the service is not running? and something is stopping it from working properly?  
> Regards,
> 
> Antonio 

Hi Antonio

Thanks for the reply

NFS is definitely running to some extent as home directories are mounted OK
and my global directory is also mounted OK.
The client only seems to fail during a large/long transfer

The autofs (NIS exported) files of interest are

maui.jaa.org.uk ~ 1# cat /etc/auto.home
#*      -fstype=nfs     148.197.29.5:/exports/home/&
*       -fstype=nfs4,rsize=32768,wsize=32768    148.197.29.5:/home/&

maui.jaa.org.uk ~ 2# cat /etc/auto.direct
#/global    -fstype=nfs  148.197.29.5:/exports/global
/global    -fstype=nfs4,rsize=32768,wsize=32768  148.197.29.5:/global

The client locks up with no indication of a problem in /var/log/messages
after a restart

The server shows
[root at maui ~]# cat /var/log/messages |grep nfs
...
Nov 20 16:25:48 maui kernel: nfs4_cb: server 148.197.29.252 not responding, timed out
...

The client falls over at "random" times during a transfer and leaves a partially
copied file when using cp

I did wonder whether it was something to do with FS-Cache but
as far as I can see nfs is not using it.
dmesg includes
FS-Cache: Loaded
FS-Cache: Netfs 'nfs' registered for caching

but this shows no activity
cat /proc/fs/fscache/stats

John