Hey all,

We've been running into a few strange problems lately with our file server. We have around 15-20 other servers that are mapped to this system either via NFS or Samba running various processing jobs. The python scripts for these jobs are on the server. Some of these systems have a good 40-50 jobs running on them, and this has been working great for months.

Now, over the past week (since the last server reboot), random jobs have been freezing on the systems when trying to read or write to the file server. However, when this happens, the other jobs on the system will continue working happily, with no problems reading from the server at all. Trying to browse to the mount point for the file server doesn't work after this happens either. Unmounting and remounting via command line also doesn't work, as things just hang. The only way I've been able to clear a system up when this happens is to reboot, and everything remounts just fine when booting up.

Most of these issues have happened on other Linux systems mounting with NFS, but we do have a few Windows 2000 systems that have also had a random job freeze up lately and have needed to reboot to clear things up.

It seems to me that we're hitting some kind of limit on the file server. Unfortunately, when this has happened, there are not any logs on either system that mention hitting an error. For the time being we're keeping our systems running with the minimum number of scripts, and so far it seems to be helping. I'd very much like to find out what's causing this though and fix it.

I've done some searching, and have looking into problems caused by file descriptors and/or hitting the open files limit. I can't find any other problems like this, so I'm hesitant to start modifying things like that without being sure.

The file server itself is fairly hefty. It's a Pentium D (dual core) system, 2GB of memory, SATAII RAID-5 array, etc. Fedora Core 5 is the operating system. Most other systems connecting to it are also on Fedora 5, with 1 or 2 still on Fedora 4. As mentioned above, we do have a few Windows 2000 Server systems connecting via Samba as well.

Any advice on this will really be appreciated.

Thanks!