FreeBSD as nfs-server

[Claus Guttesen]

Hi.

Last week I phased out my remaining trusty FreeBSD nfs-server. The
first was phased out three weeks ago. They have served me well for
about two year and I have been *very* satisfied with the performance
and stability. The below mentioned reasons made the decision easier to
migrate to veritas volume manager on solaris.

1. Lack of a journaling filesystem.
2. Lack of a logical volume manager.

My intent is *not* to start a flamewar, simpy stating why I had to migrate.

Additional comments to item #1:
 We have background-fsck, what's wrong with that?

Well, there is nothing wrong with that in a way. Background-fsck does
work, but my nfs-server have had three unplanned reboots during that
time, none of them was caused by the nfs-server itself, but caused by
other factors. The server comes back up as it should and detects that
the volumes wasn't unmounted in an orderly fashion and defers the
volume to background-fsck. So far so good.

When the background-fsck is done with one volume and it jumps to the
next, my webservers connected to the nfs-server are unable to read and
write to the nfs-volumes for a period of 15-30 minutes. The smallest
(of several) volume is 400 GB and the largest (of several) is 2 TB.
The outcome is that my website is seen as being inaccessible. This was
with FreeBSD 5.2 beta through 5.4 I saw this behaviour.

So I'm delighted to read that the initial work on a journaling
filesystem has started.

Additional comments to item #2:
Use vinum!

Is it vinum or gvinum which is the future of FreeBSD?

The docs related to vinum refers to some parameters in newfs not
present in the manual-pages.

As more volumes are added the task of configuring (g)vinum will become
more and more timeconsuming and errorprone. Does it recover correctly
in the event of a crash, how about fsck/newfs on volumes larger than 2
TB?


The camcontrol program on FreeBSD is a very robust tool. This is one
program I miss. Some parameters to the find- and date-commands on
FreeBSD aren't there on solaris, so I'll keep the old nfs-server
around for doing day2day maintenance.

I'm keeping FreeBSD as webservers (of course).

regards
Claus