NFS: freeze during copy [ ALMOST RESOLVED]

[rvenne at dental-on-line.fr]

Christopher Sean Hilton wrote:

>On Wed, 2006-09-27 at 16:37 -0400, Kris Kennaway wrote:
>  
>
>>>and my luck has it such that i've not had a lockup since i added that  
>>>extra debugging code into the kernel :-) or :-( depending on your  
>>>view...
>>>      
>>>
>>Heisenbugs are great! :)
>>
>>    
>>
>
>Before I classified this as a Heisenbug I'd switch from NFS over UDP to
>NFS over TCP. The original poster also hasn't mentioned if he's using
>soft, or hard mounts or if he has the intr option on. Depending on how
>these options are tuned NFS lockups are normal. 
>
>I used keep /usr/src mounted via NFS and do make buildworld/installworld
>on my laptop. The network was a switched lan and there were no
>firewalls. Very occasionally the build process would lockup. When I went
>to debug this a sage wizard suggested that the first step was to switch
>from UDP to TCP. As it turns out the problem was that the ne2000 driver
>on my laptop was loosing packets. With udp the means to detect this was
>weak to non-existant. Changing to TCP meant that not only could the
>kernel detect that a packet had gotten lost but it only had to resend
>that one packet, not the entire buffer. From that point on the build
>process worked flawlessly in fact I was able to extend the process to
>work between a local NFS server and a remote NFS client located 25 miles
>away at the other end of an IPsec tunnel.
>
>Bottom line: change to TCP and retest. NFS over UDP is very sensitive to
>packet loss. 
>
>-- Chris
>
>  
>
yeah, your'ar right, NFS tcp would be propably better. My setup was 
using UDP with changing port, that's the reason why, as for me, the copy 
was freezed after somes bytes. But I still supprised by kernel freezing 
after a night, so that I've had to reboot the server.

As 5.x's support will be stopped, I'd better to upgrade all to 6.1 ( NFS 
problems, openssl secure issues...)

thanks a lot for all.

-- 
Richard VENNE
www.dental-on-line.com
Phone: 01 43 27 94 24
fax: 01 43 27 66 85