I would like to thank:
Nikola Milutinovic
Natesa
Sean O'Connell
David L. Smith
who all took the trouble to send me their suggestions.
Sean made several useful suggestions taking the trouble to write to me
several times. However, the messages disappeared yesterday as
mysteriously as they appeared, beginning about three weeks ago.
Then today I got a message from Dave who suggested that if the server
(i.e. the workstation exporting the file system) was busy doing file
system stuff the NFS clients might complain. At the same time he
pointed out that a lot of activity on the clients (e.g. running many
jobs) may cause the NFS server to run out of UDP threads.
Anyway, I put two and two together and thought that the problem was
probably correlated to a user with his home directory on quantum running
jobs on chemphys. Sure enough, a check of the batch system accounting
logs showed that the problem began when he started running a particular
program a few weeks ago and stopped yesterday when his programs ended.
Since he hasn't been around yet to submit any more runs, things have been
quiet.
I think that now it will be a relatively simple matter to figure out
what his program is doing (presumably some heavy i/o at certain
intervals), to cause the poor NFS server response. Fixing it may
require (as Sean suggested) replacing the ethermet card on the aging
workstation with one that can support 100baseT full duplex.
This list has proven itself once again. Their is nothing like
experience for solving some problems and this list provides a large
body of collective relevant experience.
Regards,
Peter Stern
My original question was:
I have been getting the following messages at high frequency in my
/var/adm/messages file for the past week. Users accessing their
home directories on quantum from chemphys complain of a delay (no
wonder). What is the cause of the problem? I see no complaints
in the error logs of quantum, either in /var/adm/messages, syslogs
or via dia.
Dec 24 11:13:36 chemphys vmunix: NFS3 server quantum ok
Dec 24 11:14:02 chemphys vmunix: NFS3 server quantum not responding still trying
Dec 24 11:14:02 chemphys vmunix: NFS3 server quantum ok
Dec 24 11:22:22 chemphys vmunix: NFS3 server quantum not responding still trying
Dec 24 11:22:22 chemphys vmunix: NFS3 server quantum ok
etc., etc.
Received on Tue Dec 26 2000 - 15:38:56 NZDT