Linux/KDE and NFS locking on 7-stable

Gerrit Kühn gerrit at pmp.uni-hannover.de
Mon Sep 14 14:53:07 UTC 2009


Hi all,

I upgraded a FreeBSD fileserver last week from 7.0-stable to 7.2-stable
and experience some weird problems now with Linux NFS clients.
The Linux Clients mount their home directories via nfs. I usually use
"nolock" on the client side, because file locking was always troublesome
in the past. On the Clients the users run kde 3.5 or 4.2.
After the update of the server kde 3.5 quit starting up (after logging
in with kdm) on the spalsh screen and comes up with some kind of I/O error
when writing to the home dir. At the same time the server complains about

kernel: NLM: failed to contact remote rpcbind, stat = 5, port = 28416

Any other window manager (xfce, icewm, mwm, twm) seems to work fine.
Playing around with locking, udp/tcp, rebooting some times then somehow
magically made it work with kde 3.5 again (although I am using the same
mount options in the and as I used before):

mclane:/tank/home/gco  /tank/home/ghf nfs nfsvers=3,rw,nolock,nordirplus 0
0

Turning locking on definitely does not work (tried it three times).
rcp.lockd and rpc.statd are running on the server side, no further tuning
done there.

KDE 4.2 seems to have better, I have been able to get it working with
locking turned on (but it refused to work without locking with the same
errors as described above for kde 3.5).

I find the whole situation a bit unattractive. Can anybody here give me a
hint which combination of mount options should work for a FreeBSD Server
running 7.2-stable and Linux clients running 2.6.29 and KDE3/4? I am not
that much into performance here, I want a stable working solution. And why,
after all, is KDE so picky about locking and nfs homedirs anyway? All
other environments appear not to show these problems.


cu
  Gerrit


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