On Wed, 26 Mar 2008 09:58:50 -0500 Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > What kind of problems do you see? It can be hard to get firewall > openings right and it depends on uid's matching at the client and server > for file ownership and permissions, but those things either work right > or not at all. You shouldn't see reliability or performance problems > unless you have hundreds of busy clients. What I mostly see is every imaginable problem on different machines at different times :-). I think the root cause is related to having vast numbers of different versions of unix/linux on different machines all of which claim to "support" NFS, but which together are highly unreliable (especially the ones too old to support tcp connections). The worst problem is data corruption on writes, especially writing large files across NFS, they will often wind up with large chunks of zero bytes in place of the actual data. There is one particular machine (in theory running the same dadgum version of linux as several others) where some sort of nonsense persists in always getting stale NFS filehandle messages any time I try to read specific individual files. I always have to unmount and remount the filesystem when it gets like this. (Neither system was down or not talking at any point, just some fiddling of the files in question, replacing them with symlinks, then suddenly the stale filehandle messages start). The protocols are in theory supposed to support negotiation of the correct NFS version when connecting to older machines, but that almost never works, we have to manually fiddle fstab entries to explicitly give the proper nfsver option or we get things like the filesystem is "mounted" but all attempts to access files get errors. Herding cats has got to have fewer irritations than using NFS :-).
