We have a 3000/700 that we are using as a fileserver for some very large
cad/cam binaries. (I have no choice but to use this machine) Each of the
binary packages are about 1 gig for each platform, and for each revision
of the software. I have 16 gigs of disk hanging off this little machine.
The problem arises when doing an installation from a remote machine to
the Alpha. The installation tools require that the installation actually
occur from the machine architecture on which the package actually runs.
For example, to install the binaries for the HP-UX machines, one must
sit in front of an HP and install the binaries across NFS to the Alpha's
disks. It sucks, but it's the way the vendor does it.
The problem I'm having is that during the 1gig installation the installation
sometimes get corrupted because the network, disks and cdrom don't keep
in perfect sync. The vendor told me I should probably mount the ADVfs
filesystems on the Alpha with the sync flag so that all writes will be
immediatly written to disk before the machine tells NFS that is has been
written. Apparently, the default is nosync, where the machine tells NFS
that the file is written, even if data is still in the cache.
So, the vendor is requesting that I mount the filesystems with the sync
flag. Before I do this, I wanted to know what the consequences would be
if I added the sync option to the fstab file. And, can I just modify the
fstab file and reboot? I am expecting a performance hit, but cures the
corruption of the 1gig installations, I'll be happy.
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide this novice NFS guy :)
Also, any advice you have for setting NFS paramaters for serving very
large files I'd further appreciate.
--
Ed Jones Internet email: EJONES16_at_ford.com
CAD/CAM/PIM Internal email: ejones16_at_cadcam.pms.ford.com
313-845-6068 B220 Suite 100 ALPHA
Received on Wed May 29 1996 - 17:36:01 NZST