NFS server not responding/is alive again

[Chuck Swiger]

Hi--

Janos Dohanics wrote:
> I have a FreeBSD 4.11 machine which mounts a volume from a Netapp ONTap.
> The FreeBSD machine also acts as a Samba PDC. The Samba volumes are in
> the NFS-mounted volume. There are about a dozen Win2K workstations on
> the network served by the Samba server.
> 
> Lately I have noticed that /var/log/messages is full with entries like:
> 
> ... /kernel: nfs server filer01:/vol/vol0/psa: not responding
> ... /kernel: nfs server filer01:/vol/vol0/psa: is alive again
> 
> It seems that the server sometimes is unresponsive for less than a
> second, many other times it's unresponsive for a number of seconds (as
> many as 8 seconds).

In order to proceed, it would help to run a tcpdump between the NFS server and 
this FreeBSD machine, and take a look at the packets just before one of these 
errors is logged, and try to correlate with anything else in your logs (ie, a 
particular Samba client did something or saw an error as a result).

Use something like:

   tcpdump -w packet.dmp -s 0 host filer01 and host localhost

... and read via "tcpdump -r packet.dmp".

Note that Samba is going to be happier serving from local disks; it would be 
better for the clients to mount against filer01 directly than to "forward" a 
remote filesystem via this NFS->CIFS/SMB bridge...

-- 
-Chuck