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  • From: "Mathieu L." <lejatorn AT smgl.homelinux.net>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [SM-Discuss] [off-topic] Admin advice
  • Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:25:06 +0200

Hi all,

We're having some trouble here at the lab and since I'm gonna be more
or less responsible for that stuff I thought I'd ask my sourcemage
elders for advice. :)

We have an NFS file server hosting the homes of the users. Another
server is dedicated to NIS authentification. So on each desktop
there's automount running which asks the NIS server what to mount
whenever a user wants to access one of the homes. Then the NIS
replies and the automount goes to fetch on the nfs server what was
indicated by the NIS tables. I must stress the point that since the
homes are spread among several partitions, each of them are mounted
separetely on demand, so that's a lot of nfs requests (as opposed to if
the desktops were mounting once and for all all the user's homes).

Anyways, it so happens that the NFS server had kernel panics several
times. We don't know what causes it exactly, we just know it happens
everytime because specifically one of the partitions. It seems like the
partition gets corrupted somehow and cleaning it with some fscks seems
to solve the problem for a while and then it happens again after some
time out of the blue.
If I let this partition unmounted, no kernel
panics. I think if I let it mounted but don't export it (so the homes on
this partition can't get accessed) it doesn't crash either so I suspect
some corruption occurs because of NFS.

What do you think of that? I've heard that NFS is not meant to deal with
lots of requests thus it is likely the cause of the corruption.
So does anyone knows of a replacement for nfs we could use with such a
setup? If not, what change would you suggest to avoid that crash?

Thanks,
Mathieu.

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