Personal System Folders and NFS

[William Roberts;]

In <CHET.90Dec4132813 at mars.Advansoft.COM> chet at Advansoft.COM (Chet Wood) 
writes:
>One of our users has _never_ been able to log in-- the system hangs
>for hours-- until you telnet in and kill the fake_mac_os process.
>( Creating a local home directory for him will presumably cure the
>problem-- if he ever again shows an interest in using the Mac.)

Don't blame NFS or A/UX for this problem - it is bound to be your user 
shooting him or herself in the foot. Classic techniques for this are:

1) Putting "exec something" in the .login or .cshrc
2) Putting an interactive program in the .login (e.g. a newsreader)

Remember that the .login and .cshrc files get run by the shell used to invoke 
the /mac/bin/mac32 script, so they happen long before startmac gets run, and 
you probably don't even see the prompt on the console because you are looking 
at that "Starting session for fred.." message.

>A friend in the A/UX group has hypothesized that it may be an ethernet
>problem. We are running a 3COM board on our FX. I'm told it interrupts
>the processor on every longword. You're supposed to have an apple ethernet
>card of series "F" or something like that for decent throughput on the
>FX.

Read this stuff about Ethernet cards to mean, "the FX is a damn good machine 
and deserves an Ethernet card with some useful memory on it". I entirely 
agree: the performance on the FX as an NFS server is better than doubled by 
using the Revision L Apple Ethernet Card with has 64K of memory on it rather 
than 16K, just because fewer packets get lost due to no buffer space available 
on the card. It might conceivably help with doing lots of NFS reads (8K+header 
packets mean you can't get two read replies into a 16k buffer), but I don't 
believe that that is the "long login time" problem. I intend to use nfswatch 
to find out what is really happening, and I'll mail this group when I have 
some answers.
--

William Roberts                 ARPA: liam at cs.qmw.ac.uk
Queen Mary & Westfield College  UUCP: liam at qmw-cs.UUCP
Mile End Road                   AppleLink: UK0087
LONDON, E1 4NS, UK              Tel:  071-975 5250 (Fax: 081-980 6533)