Linux client on Solaris 7 NFS server

Linux client on Solaris 7 NFS server

[Wade Hampton]

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

I have a Fedora Core 1.0 client connecting to a
Solaris X86 Version 7 NFS server.  The Solaris server
has locked up several times since I started accessing
it from Linux (this is the only change to the Solaris
system's environment).  I was wondering if this
was an NFS problem on Solaris 7 or could be a
hardware problem with the NIC.

The options I was using for NFS mount were
auto,ro,bg,soft.  

After reading the NFS howto, it indicated that 
"Solaris servers are especially sensitive to packet size".
This is vague and does not tell what the consequences of
default values or values other than 32768 might be....

Could "sensitive" mean bad performance, lost data, lost connections,
disconnects, locked up clients, or locked up servers?

Could this be a reason that the Solaris server is locking up?

Has anyone else experienced this? 

If this is the case, does Sun have a patch that addresses this?

Any Solaris Admins out there that can tell me how I can
check the Solaris server to see if such a patch (if it exists)
is applied?

I did change my mount to the following options:  
    auto,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,ro,bg,soft.

So far, I have not had any server lockups (since yesterday).
However, I need to be sure that I am not introducing a problem
by using Linux boxes with these servers.....

Also, if my Fedora box is accessing the server via a WAN,
should I use NFS over TCP/IP?   If my network goes down,
do I have to unmount and remount if I am using TCP/IP?

Thanks,
--
Wade Hampton



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Re: Linux client on Solaris 7 NFS server

[Steve Dickson]

Wade Hampton wrote:

> I have a Fedora Core 1.0 client connecting to a
> Solaris X86 Version 7 NFS server.  The Solaris server
> has locked up several times since I started accessing
> it from Linux (this is the only change to the Solaris
> system's environment).  I was wondering if this
> was an NFS problem on Solaris 7 or could be a
> hardware problem with the NIC.

A network trace of the lockup would be good...

SteveD.



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RE: Linux client on Solaris 7 NFS server

[Lever, Charles]

> Also, if my Fedora box is accessing the server via a WAN,
> should I use NFS over TCP/IP?   If my network goes down,
> do I have to unmount and remount if I am using TCP/IP?

yes, you should use TCP when running NFS over a WAN.

generally on these late kernels network partitions will
not cause issues that require a umount/remount sequence.
if you are unsure about the reliability of TCP, may i
suggest you use it with the "soft" mount option and a
high retrans setting (see the "mount" and "nfs" man pages).

(and btw, i agree with steve, if you can reproduce this
problem and capture a network trace, that would be helpful:
use "tcpdump -s0 -w /tmp/dump host server-name-here" to
capture a raw network trace).


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RE: Linux client on Solaris 7 NFS server

[dwight]

On 2003-12-24 15:12, Wade Hampton wrote:
>
>  I have a Fedora Core 1.0 client connecting to a
>  Solaris X86 Version 7 NFS server.  The Solaris server
>  has locked up several times since I started accessing
>  it from Linux (this is the only change to the Solaris
>  system's environment).  I was wondering if this
>  was an NFS problem on Solaris 7 or could be a
>  hardware problem with the NIC.
>  ...

If the Solaris Server is locking up, this is a problem with
Solaris. It might be somehow triggered by Linux, but that is
absolutely no excuse for a server problem. The server should
just stay up.

Sun has some excellent resources available for making certain 
your system is up-to-date. Go over sun.com, and start with the 
support link. They have this patch manager tool which will 
examine your system, figure out what patches it needs, and 
apply them. I don't recall if you need a support contract to
use it or not.

One of the other nice tools they have is their search of their
bugs database system. Here's one which may be related:

#57406: "NFS Server May Panic Upon Receipt of Certain Invalid
Client Requests" Oct 27, 2003.

That's a bad sign. They do list a number of patches for the
issue.

"Sensitive" should refer to performance. My experience is that
Linux NFS clients exhibit horrible performance issues with Sun
servers in standard, out-of-the-box configurations. That's in
comparison to using pure Sun or pure Linux Server/Client
combinations.

        -dwight-




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