Sun-4 severe NFS problem

[Dan Franklin]

Thanks to everyone who responded.  After I sent the original message (but
before it appeared in Sun-Spots) someone here at BBN on our local Sun
mailing list suggested adjusting the buffer sizes (thanks Matt!), and that
did the trick.  Surprisingly, lowering wsize to 1024 wasn't enough; but
512 was.  So we now have the world's slowest Sun-4/110 (for I/O), but at
least it's usable.  Only wsize, not rsize, needed to be adjusted.  The
Sun-4 never had any problem receiving data.  I don't consider this to be
the conclusion of this episode--I would still like some way to achieve
reasonable NFS speeds--but it helps.

I have noticed one other anomaly: when doing a cp -r on the Sun-4 copying
files onto our Microvax, it often gets a "Permission denied" error in the
middle of copying a series of files to the same directory.  It never
chooses the same file, and it always succeeds when I run it again.  The
file in question does get created, but is only zero-length.  All the files
are mode 444, so I could understand if it never worked at all (since NFS
is stateless), but to have it fail occasionally puzzles me.  But this is
only a minor annoyance right now.

	Dan Franklin