We're experiencing a very tough problem.  All our home dirs are NFS
mounted from LINUX.  On our AIX box in Portland, things just stall;
throughput is measured in 10's of bytes per second.  It's unusable.

I did a dejanews search on this.  The problem started happening with
AIX 4.2 and persists in 4.3.  I have contacted one person who posted
several years back, and he has not yet found a solution.

Our sysadm in Portland has been looking rather hard at the problem.
He has found that the AIX NFS client tries to handshake with the LINUX
server by calling rpc.lockd on the server;  however, LINUX does not
(and never has) had an rpc.lockd.  Thus, transfers don't take place
until the attempt to do the locking times out.

Note that this is different from the problem involving secure connections,
which can be solved by a reconfiguration on either the AIX or the LINUX end.
AFAIK, this problem, which has been the subject of many postings causes the
mount itself to fail.

More to the point is the following, which appeared here on April 9 but
which, AFAIK, has never elicited a response.  I also got some individual
responses from people who say they're having the same problem, but who also
don't have answers.

Does anyone have a workaround for this?

Thanks,
-P.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------
NFS problems on AIX 4.3.2
Author:   ABK Systeme <a...@abk.de>
Date:   1999/04/09
Forum:   comp.unix.aix

Hi all,

We have problems with a NFS-client on a RS/6000 box running AIX V4.3.2
and a
linux (intel pc) NFS-Server (kernel 2.0.35, nfsd 2.2b29). Everything
seems to
work fine, but after some time the client side seems to be stuck and
states
that the nfs-server is not responding. After another period of time (up
to
some minutes) the AIX system and the linux server are talking to each
other again
until they get stuck once more.

Using snoop (part of the output is given below), we found out, that the
AIX
wants to do some kind of handshaking with the server, that does not seem
to
respond as the AIX expects. As we have lot's of other unix boxes (even
some
running AIX V4.1), that work fine with the NFS-server, we assume that it
is
a problem of AIX 4.3.2!?

Does anyone have any suggestions??

TIA

Torsten Martiner
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------

Also, AIX is notorious for{*filter*} on timeouts with DNS, especially for
reverse lookups, so be sure that both machines have long and short
entries for each other in their /etc/hosts files, and that their
search order is setup to check there before going to NIS or DNS.

cheers
-
geoff

We received a suggestion by mail that seems to have solved the problem.  On
the AIX side, when mounting, use UDP instead of TCP/IP and specify
vers=nfs2.

    -P.

news:371A305F.41C6@home.com...

Hi!

May you please provide an example for /etc/exports on the server-side and
the mount-options on the client-side?
I am not able to mount NFS-homes from an AIX-4.1.4-server on the
Linux-2.2.2-clients.

Stephan.

--
Stephan L?scher            Stephan.Loesc...@allianz.de
AGIS - Allianz Gesellschaft fr Informatik Service mbH
Gutenbergstra?e 8               D - 85774 Unterf?hring
Tel: +49(0)89/3800-5720        Fax: +49(0)89/3800-6934

Hmm, I had no problems at all mounting filesystem from an AIX 4.1.5 server
on Linux 2.0.36 and 2.2 clients. You should put in the -ac patches under
2.2 though, as this improves NFS write performance considerably. I used
no options on the mount command line and only the -access=netgroup in
the /etc/exports file.

--
Jens-Uwe Mager  <pgp-mailto:62CFDB25>
When your hammer is C++ everything starts to look like a thumb.

-
G

news:ry2btgiff23.fsf@tgx045.gd.azsach.de...

That is a different problem, in two ways.  (1) Your problem involves
AIX server, LINUX client, whereas this thread involves the opposite;
(2) You are seeing a failure of the mount command;  in this thread,
the mount succeeds, but then performance is slow.

There is a long history of your problem available by means of a
dejanews search.  The problem is probably that LINUX requires
a secure port by default whereas AIX does not supply one by
default.  You can fix this from either the LINUX or the AIX side,
but I don't remember the details.  Check out dejanews, using as
keywords AIX, LINUX and NFS.

Hope this helps (or leads to something that helps),

-P.

Hi!

Thank you. I have found, what was wrong!
My Linux-client runs as a DHCP-client and on the AIX-server
a "host linuxbox" gave me 10.101.6.1, but a "host 10.101.6.1" said "Host
not found."
Now I put it in the /etc/hosts and it's OK.

When I start NT on "linuxbox" then it can resolve the IP-address without an
entry in /etc/hosts. Why?

Stephan.

--
Stephan L?scher            Stephan.Loesc...@allianz.de
AGIS - Allianz Gesellschaft fr Informatik Service mbH
Gutenbergstra?e 8               D - 85774 Unterf?hring
Tel: +49(0)89/3800-5720        Fax: +49(0)89/3800-6934

Likely, it's because DNS is configured on the NT box and has not been
configured on the AIX box.

--
James Carlson, Software Architect                   <carl...@ibnets.com>
IronBridge Networks / 55 Hayden Avenue   71.246W   Vox:  +1 781 372 8132
Lexington MA  02421-7996 / USA           42.423N   Fax:  +1 781 372 8090
"PPP Design and Debugging" --- http://people.ne.mediaone.net/carlson/ppp