NFS mount problem (hangup on write)

[Dr. A. Baumfalk]

Hello community,

I have a strange NFS-problem using Linux (Kernel 2.6.18-5-686, i386) as server and HPUX (B.10.20, A9000/712) as client.

The problem occurs, when some special files are written. Writing of other files works, strangely enough. I could not find any correlation between the files with this error; filesize or modification date seems not to matter.

The wireshark analysis showed, that some of the write calls (3-4) do not receive a write reply. There are retrys, but those fail as well.

Is there some idea, what could be the problem?

Best regards
Arno Baumfalk.

[Sushil Srivastava]

Can you provide the error which you are getting while writing.

[V. Nyga]

HI,

10.20 is *quite* old - which nfs version are you running at hp-ux and at linux side?

Volkmar
*Best wishes from the Oktoberfest*

[Dr. A. Baumfalk]

When mounted with "hard" mount I get no error at all, but the cp process hangs (even kill does not help). When mounted "soft" I get "cp: bad copy".

But before thinking harder: we found a hardware problem on the linux server; seems as if there are problems depending on the PCI-cards installed. We added an old network card for testing purposes, which slows down PCI speed to 33 MHz, and now the problem seems gone-even when using the original network adapter.
We guess that it has something to do with the riser-card which is installed...

But thankyou for the quick reaction!

BR
Arno

[V. Nyga]

Hi again,

it's also a common problem of NFS if switch and network card have different speed (or HalfDuplex/FullDuplex mismatch).
A 'ls -l' works?

V.

[Dr. A. Baumfalk]

Read operations were always ok, including ls and du.
Now with slower PCI bus speed everything seems to work fine; I performed some larger copy operations and had no errors at all. Seems as if some "harder" bit combinations somehow failed at the receiver side.

I will observe and the problem a bit before going "in production" again... (a stable backup solution is running now).