[mythtv-users] NFS woes

jack snodgrass mrlinuxgroups at gmail.com
Wed Dec 6 20:58:15 UTC 2006


On 12/6/06, Tom Wright <thomaswright at cantab.net> wrote:
> On Wednesday 06 December 2006 20:11, Tom Wright wrote:
> > 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).
>
> I tried running
>
> cat big.file >/dev/null
>
> on bragi, where big.file is stored on the NFS-mounted JFS partition.  For a
> 1.2GB file, it worked fine (and at about the speed I'd expect for gigabit
> ethernet).  For a 2.7GB file, it crashed but from the time it took, I'd guess
> that it crashed before it had copied 1GB.  Probably just chance then, and it
> might've crashed when copying the 1.2GB file.
>
> One other thing: I have another machine (loki) which has the same mount
> options for its NFS shares but doesn't net-boot and I have used this to copy
> multi-gigabyte files without any trouble.
>
> To test things, I decided to mount the JFS partition on loki using the same
> mount options as bragi does.  True to form, it crashed the server so I'm
> pretty sure the problem is to do with exporting JFS over NFS.
>
> Two questions:
> - Is it possible to set up a mythtv-friendly filesystem which is exportable
> over NFS in a stable way? How does one do this? (If you're thinking XFS, I've
> tried that one too and it's worse than JFS).
> - Alternatively, is it possible to use ext3 with mythtv? what formatting
> options do I use? What are the disadvantages?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Tom


I found that samba ( cifs ) is faster than NFS for me so I use cifs to
mount most of
my drives. I have a dedicated NAS box that has 2TB of drives. They are
xfs formatted
partitions. My backend and frontend use mount.cifs to mount them.  I don't have
any issues transfering data across my gigabit network. All of my boxes run
Fedora FC5.

cifs does not support file names that end with a '.' so I can't use cifs for my
cyrus imap files... they end with a '.'. I use nfs for those. I got signifigant
time improvements copying large ( 4gig ) images over cifs -vs- nfs.

jack


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