Strange NFS Problem

[Douglas Furlong]

Good morning all.

Considering the exceedingly fast and speedy response I got yesterday
with regards to my problem accessing edirectory.co.uk I thought I would
try my luck with an NFS problem.

All our unix systems at work have their home directory mounted via NFS
to allow hot seating (not that they ever use it!).

I have just recently upgraded to Fedora Core 2, running the most recent
kernel.

All the workstations are running Fedora Core 2, with the second from
last kernel (due to CIFS/SMB problems in the latest one).

Unfortunately there are two users who's connection to the NFS server is
dropped and does not seem to want to reconnect. To date I have.

1) Replaced both of their PC's
2) Replaced switch
3) will replace network cables tomorrow
4) I have tried numerous version of the kernel including the testing
kernel from rawhide.
5) Tried variations in the timeo=x value to see if that will help.

These lockups vary in time between 30 minutes and 5 hours. Network
connections are not affected by this lock up, I am able to ssh on to the
box (that's how I collected the tcpdump data).

I also have two windows PC's on this switch and things appear to be
fine.

I have 7 or 8 other systems running linux on the network and NFS
communication is not affected.

I have increased the number of servers on the NFS server from 8 to 16. I
did this by editing /etc/init.d/nfs (don't think this is of any help).

I took some tcpdump info on both the client and the server to try and
see if I can work out what is going on. Initially it is not providing me
with much information (but loads of data).

I have attached two files, one from the client and one from the server.
Main reason for attaching them is due to length of data. I had wanted to
attach them as plain text to simplify access, but at 100k it's a bit too
large.
I didn't want to cut them down too much just in case I removed some
pertinent information :(



-- 
Douglas Furlong
Systems Administrator
Firebox.com
T: 0870 420 4475        F: 0870 220 2178
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