REPOST - problems with pcnfs

[Roberto Togneri]

About a week ago I posted a news article regarding a problem we are
experiencing with running pcnfs and mounting filesystems from our
IRISes. I think somebody from Silicon Graphics tried to mail me a reply
but there was a bug in our setup which only left a remnant of that mail.
This bug has been fixed (I've got replies to another article I posted)
so I'll repeat my problem here:


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 newsgroup. 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?

Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.
--
Dr. Roberto Togneri
Dept. of EE Engineering                 ACSnet: robert at swanee.ee.uwa.oz
The University of Western Australia     INTERnet: robert at swanee.ee.uwa.oz.au