Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!bu-cs!husc6!rice!sun-spots-request From: reg@lti.com (Rick Genter x18) Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun Subject: Networking problems in unusual configuration Keywords: Networks Message-ID: <8903301701.AA01450@lti.com> Date: 22 Apr 89 00:44:42 GMT Sender: usenet@rice.edu Organization: Sun-Spots Lines: 54 Approved: Sun-Spots@rice.edu I have a bizarre situation. We have a Sun-3/180 server hooked up to an Isolan multiport repeater. We have four network legs connected to the repeater (including the leg containing the server). We have ~20 diskless and dataless Suns hooked up to the network; some are on the same leg as the server, while some are on the other legs. The Suns on the server leg work fine. The Suns on the other legs work marginally, requiring us to cut the buffer sizes for NFS reads and writes to 1024. Anything larger and we get NFS Server not responding/still trying. For a long time we suspected the repeater, but then we got an Ethernet test box (handy dandy little piece of equipment) and blasted packets across the repeater in great volumes during times of great load, and never lost a single packet. What's even more bizarre is that the Suns on the other legs go through tftpboot and arp and everything just fine, until they start to "heavily" use NFS. Thus I suspect there is some parameter (other than rsize/wsize) in NFS that needs tweaking. The rsize/wsize tweak is not an acceptable option; the non-server-leg Suns run *SIGNIFICANTLY* slower than the server-leg Suns, to the point of almost being unusable. I tried fiddling with timeo, but with 8K buffers even a timeo of 50 (5.0 seconds) doesn't work. We have a variation of the problem which is that some machines on the non-server leg will work with rsize/wsize=1024 when configured as dataless nodes, but if you try to make them diskless nodes it doesn't matter what size you give, they hang during /etc/rc. They always hang executing "ps -U"; if you comment that line out, they hang at the next command in rc that does "significant" I/O. (ps -U builds the file /etc/psdatabase -- it's not clear what ps does with this file, but it doesn't seem to work without it.) "Hanging" means "NFS Server not responding/still trying" We've been around and around with Sun on this; I have yet to talk to someone who struck me as halfway competent. I've been dealing with Suns since '82 and am no novice at this stuff, but I can't seem to convince Sun of that (I get bullsh*t suggestions like "are your cables making good contact"). Has anyone out there in 'Spots-Land seen anything like this? Frankly, we're stumped, and we're tired of dealing with the incompetent bozos at Sun. Thanks for hearing my gripe. - reg -- Rick Genter ...!{buita,bbn}!lti!reg Language Technology, Inc. reg%lti.uucp@bu-it.bu.edu 27 Congress St., Salem, MA 01970 (508) 741-1507 [[ This was added later: --wnl ]] A followup to my last message: all machines are Sun-3s, and all are running 4.0.1 with tty patch and itrunc patch. -reg