Sun-4 severe NFS problem

[Christopher A. Welty]

dan at watson.bbn.com (Dan Franklin) writes:
>We're having severe NFS problems involving our (only) Sun 4/110, running
>SunOS 4.0.1. The symptom is that a process attempting to copy (cp) a
>"large" file (greater than 2k bytes or so) between this machine and any of
>several others, including a Sun-3/160 (SunOS 3.4), a MicroVAX (Ultrix
>2.3), and our diskless Sun-3/50 machines (SunOS 3.4), will almost always
>hang.

We used to have this problem and learned:

Whenever you mount an NFS filesystem to/from a machine that is vastly
different in speed (for us this is sun2<->sun3 and sun3<->sun4 and
sun2<->sun4) you should use the following options to mount:

slfs1.cs.rpi.edu:/us1 /fs1/us1 nfs bg,rw,soft,rsize=2048,wsize=2048,timeo=100 1 5

(this is a line from our fstab).  You should also never mount nfs
partitions at the root level.

Christopher Welty  ---  Asst. Director, RPI CS Labs
weltyc at cs.rpi.edu             ...!njin!nyser!weltyc