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Date:      Sun, 21 Mar 1999 12:45:55 -0600 (CST)
From:      Kevin Day <toasty@home.dragondata.com>
To:        tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert)
Cc:        des@flood.ping.uio.no, dennis@etinc.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: NFS - Will it ever be fixed?
Message-ID:  <199903211845.MAA07901@home.dragondata.com>
In-Reply-To: <199903211836.LAA14073@usr06.primenet.com> from Terry Lambert at "Mar 21, 1999  6:36:12 pm"

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> > > NFS continues, after many many years, to virtually lock up systems
> > > when the server goes away and anything on it is in the path. If you
> > > try to dismount it locks up also.
> > 
> > That's a feature, and it can easily be turned off.
> > 
> > "Users continue, after many years, to refuse to read documentation,
> > and blame their incompetence on the OS and its developers...."
> 
> Making the thing fail with ESTALE on a server reboot is probably not
> as interesting to him as making the client recover from a server
> reboot.
> 

There's also the cases where setting features like 'soft' and 'intr' can
wedge the system completely. (For those that don't believe me, get 200-300
processes randomly reading/writing the nfs mount, all with 4-5 open files
across it. Log in to the system on the console. Unplug the ethernet. If the
system isn't completely locked up now, do a: cp /dev/zero /mnt/nfs/blah,
then press ^C. You're really wedged now)

The only thing that has worked for me, where in a client configuration like
that that *will* recover from an nfs server reboot is setting '-d'. (Dumb
Timer). It will essentially disable the timeout code, which is where half of
FreeBSD's nfs problems are, i believe.

Add to this the countless programs that don't see ESTALE as a fatal error,
and you'll probably beat the nfs server to death when it comes back, making
the problem worse. (Perhaps making the client cache that somehow, instead of
doing a getattr across nfs every time, to just keep returning ESTALE?)


Kevin



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