Struggling on NFS problem

[Cheng-Lin Yang]

Hi Rick and all,
I've upgrade the NFS server up to RELENG_8_0 with Rick's patches. I still see the negative "BioW Hits" on my FreeBSD NFS clients but the system is not hanged as before. So I would say somehow the upgrade is "partially successful" to solve the issue.

Howerver, new issue bumps up after the upgrade, My mail server which runs Dovecot also mounted on NFS server, shows the following error message after the upgrade
====
May  8 21:46:24 mail dovecot: IMAP(USERID): fcntl(write-lock) locking failed for file cshome/professor/USERID/Maildir/.OLD2/dovecot.index.log: Operation not supported
May  8 21:46:24 mail dovecot: IMAP(USERID): mail_index_wait_lock_fd() failed with file  cshome/professor/USERID/Maildir/.OLD2/dovecot.index.log: Operation not supported
May  8 21:46:24 mail dovecot: IMAP(USERID): fcntl(write-lock) locking failed for file  cshome/professor/USERID/Maildir/.OLD2/dovecot.index.log: Operation not supported
May  8 21:46:24 mail dovecot: IMAP(USERID): mail_index_wait_lock_fd() failed with file /cshome/professor/USERID/Maildir/.OLD2/dovecot.index.log: Operation not supported
====

Could you please kindly take a look on this new issue? Thank you. :)

Regards,
Cheng-Lin Yang
-----Original message-----
From:Rick Macklem <rmacklem at uoguelph.ca>
To:Cheng-Lin Yang <yuwen at exodus.cs.ccu.edu.tw>
Cc:freebsd <freebsd at jdc.parodius.com>,freebsd-fs <freebsd-fs at freebsd.org>,lab <lab at cs.ccu.edu.tw>
Date:Wed, 5 May 2010 11:11:00 -0400 (EDT)
Subject:Re: Struggling on NFS problem



On Wed, 5 May 2010, Cheng-Lin Yang wrote:

> Hi Jeremy,
> I certainly will, it seems to upgrading to RELENG_8 will be a highly possible solution for the issue. Therefore, I already scheduled a upgrade window on this Friday night and will keep updating you guys the result once the upgrade is done.
>
> I would also like to know that is it ok to update the source up to RELENG_8 by applying all NFS patches at the same time? Since it's a production machine, I have to make sure these two steps can be perform at the same time without any concern.
>

The patches at people.freebsd.org/~rmacklem are already in stable/8, so
you shouldn't need to apply them.

> Finally, just curious that why the problem only shows up on FreeBSD clients?
>
If it is the case where the server doesn't return ESTALE when a file
has been deleted on the server, the FreeBSD client will loop retrying
the RPC for EIO, but other clients might not. That is the only case
where I can suggest there is a difference, other than the type of
traffic and load different clients will generate.

rick