Re: NFS and kernel 2.6.x

[Daniel Egger]

On 17.04.2004, at 06:56, Chris Friesen wrote:

> > Great you want to help here. So I've a system which is NFS root using 
> > a
> > 3c940 gigabit onboard NIC on kernel 2.6.5 and which is dead fish in 
> > the
> > water somewhere in between 10 seconds and 5 minutes after boot using
> > NFS over UDP. The last thing I see are 3 or 4 messages of the type:
>
> If this is an issue, it might make sense to have root be a tmpfs 
> filesystem,
> and then have specific network mounts.

I'm trying to keep this a standard Debian system as much as possible.
Also I've several machines having a large number of shared partitions,
some of them fulfill different purposes, so I would need to customize
several instances which sounds like much work to me; part of it
certainly unnecessary because it works just fine with older kernels... 
:)

Also there is the issue that the only thing that is sort of guaranteed 
to
be transported over the network is the kernel itself. Sometimes it hangs
already when or just after loading init. I'm not convinced it will be
always able to transfer the whole ramdisk....

Forgot to mention: I've also seen segfaults and wrong file contents
in random places while init executes the scripts in /etc/rc*.d but
those seem to have gone away after I used a more conservative set
of kernel config options. Now it'll only hang.

>   Note--don't make "/var/log" network mounted, various apps default to 
> trying to check for files there--if the server goes away, you can't 
> log in/out.

There's unfortunately more to this. I also cannot log in if
any of the files (bash, bashrc, profiles, libraries, etc.)
needed for login are on nfs. The question here is what is more
reliable in terms of data transfer after an Oops: NFS or
syslogd (UDP). So far I'm satisfied with NFS here, so I don't
see a good reason to change.

Servus,
      Daniel

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