[mythtv-users] NFS woes

Tom Wright thomaswright at cantab.net
Wed Dec 6 20:11:30 UTC 2006


Hi all

I'm having real trouble with serving video files over NFS, and desperation is 
now setting in.  Here's the setup:

I have one diskless machine (bragi) booting over PXE, mounting its root 
filesystem by NFS and then mounting the video partition also over NFS.

The disks are all in my server (thor), where I have a RAID5 array formatted as 
ext3 which contains the root filesystem which bragi boots from.  It also has 
a single disk on the same RAID controller for storing videos which is 
formatted with JFS.  Both are exported from the NFS kernel server on thor.

Both shares are exported with rw,no_root_squash,async

Mount options on bragi are rw,hard,intr,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,nfsvers=3,tcp

bragi has a SysKonnect Yukon 2 network card, but I'm aware of the problem with 
tcp segmentation offload so have added this line to the init scripts:
ethtool -K eth0 tso off

The two computers are connected through a gigabit switch.

The problem is that the server (thor) hangs completely - it won't even respond 
to ping - at random intervals.  I can also force it to crash by playing a 
recording and fast-forwarding really fast (say at 30x play speed).

As soon as thor crashes, bragi runs into trouble - it carries on until it 
needs disk access, then (as its entire OS is loaded from thor) it can go no 
further.

I really need thor to be stable, as all the other computers rely on it for one 
thing or another so this is a major pain.

Please, can somebody help?  I'm happy to provide more information or run 
tests.

Thanks!

Tom
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