PC-NFS problems

[Roberto Togneri]

Our setup consists of three IRISes running 3.1d and NFS. Connected
to these are PC's running PC-NFS 3.0.1. The IRISes are cross-mounted
via NFS and the PC's mount each root filesystem of the IRISes on
separate drive letters. A peculiar problem has always existed which
I don't recall has been  mentioned in this newwgroup. The problem 
occurs when attempting to copy or even do a directory listing of the
mounted IRIS filesystems on the PC's. Every now and then the copy
command will hang on a particular file. The rcp will sometimes work
on this file but will sometimes hang as well. Doing ls or dir of
some IRIS directories will also hang. The problem in this case usually
seems to be the number of files on the directory; removing a file or
creating one solves the problem! Needless to say this also creates 
problems when using the IRIS printer from PC-NFS. The net print command
will hang on some files because they can't be copied to the spool area.

Has anybody come across these problems? 


Another problem which I think has been covered is the incompatibility
of NFS between IRISes and Suns. We can mount a Sun filesystem happily
enough but the Suns can't mount the IRIS filesystems. The mount
program returns a version mismatch diagnostic.  Is this correct?
Any solutions? Is this problem related to the above problem?

The above is very annoying because one of the Suns has an Exabyte  drive 
and if the IRIS filesystems were mounted then they could be 
archived easily using dump. Normally this is not necessary since a 
remote dump can be performed but a dump/restore facility does not 
seem to be provided with the IRISes.


Dr. Roberto Togneri
Dept. of EE Engineering
The University of Western Australia