NFS connection dropping

Alex Teslik alex at acatysmoof.com
Mon Oct 17 01:53:29 PDT 2005


Hello,

   I've been trying to do rsync backups of my local FreeBSD system to a
firewire drive that is mounted on an OSX machine and shared to my FBSD box via
nfs over gigabit copper. I have done backups before to this same firewire
drive, on these same systems, over nfs with tar and had no problems. I can't
figure out why its not working now.
   The Mac is a G4 running OSX 10.2.8 and is the NFS server. The firewire
drive is plugged into this machine and is named "BackupDrive". I activate the
nfs sharing on this machine for this drive by running the commands:

/usr/sbin/portmap
/usr/sbin/mountd
/sbin/nfsd -t -u -n 6

The drive is configured in NetInfo Manager as:

name      /Volumes/BackupDrive
clients   192.168.4.1
opts      mapall=root

All power saving and disk spindown features have been turned off in System
Preferences.

   The FreeBSD machine is an x86 box running 4.10-RELEASE-p5. I mount the
BackupDrive to the local mount point /mnt/misc via the command:

mount 192.168.4.200:/Volumes/BackupDrive /mnt/misc

All power-saving features are disabled on this box as well - it is a server. I
then run rsync on the FBSD box to backup a local disk to the mounted nfs disk.
Everything works great for about 5-10 minutes, and then the rsync freezes and
issues the message:

nfs server 192.168.4.200:/Volumes/BackupDrive: not responding

The rsync shell is frozen. I try to do df in another shell, but the df simply
hangs. I've tried killall for nfsd, mountd, portmap, nfsiod, and df on both
machines as unsuccessful attempts to try to get the FBSD shells to un-hang.
The only way I have found to un-hang the shells is to reboot the FBSD box.
During this freeze time, I can access the firewire drive on the Mac with no
problems - it is only FBSD that is frozen. I have tried to re-serve the drive
via nfs, but the FBSD box does not reconnect to it automagically.

    I've tried reading Google and everywhere else I can think of - does anyone
have any tips or ideas on what might be causing the timeout?

Thanks,
Alex


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