LinuxQuestions.org - Never-ending GETATTR calls, NFS, Nautilus

I have a simple home network consisting of a linux server running nfs and samba and a client machine which is running win2000 and several flavors of linux. Slackware with 2.4.31 is my main desktop. The server is currently running SuSE 8.2 with a 2.4.x kernel. I run KDE 90 percent of the time, but occasionally run Gnome or another wm for a change of pace.

My problem is this: In Gnome, when the root NFS share is opened in Nautilus, I get a never-ending stream of of network activity between the client and the server. Running tcpdump shows that this activity is exclusively GETATTR calls from the client and replies from the server.

This activity only occurs in nautilus (both in Gnome and when used in Xfce4) but does not happen in konqueror (KDE file manager). There are a number of directories within the root NFS share that I have symlinks to from within my home directory on the client. When I open these in Nautilus, I don't get this activity.

The NFS share is mounted at boot on the client as follows:

bertha:/mnt/data /mnt/data-n nfs auto,user 0 0

/etc/exports on the server:

/mnt/data 192.168.1.11(rw,no_root_squash,sync)

In an effort to see what was different about what happened in Konqueror vs. what I was seeing with nautilus, I went through the process of opening the NFS share in Konqueror while tcpdump was running.

What I saw was the same GETATTR calls and replies, but they came to an end with an ARP request from the server and an ARP response from the client.

Code:

14:14:01.836976 IP bertha.local.nfs > peggyo.local.334371064: reply ok 84 fsstat [|nfs]

14:14:01.837003 IP peggyo.local.351148280 > bertha.local.nfs: 108 fsinfo [|nfs]

14:14:01.837112 IP bertha.local.nfs > peggyo.local.351148280: reply ok 80 fsinfo [|nfs]

14:14:01.837146 IP peggyo.local.367925496 > bertha.local.nfs: 116 getattr [|nfs]

14:14:01.837264 IP bertha.local.nfs > peggyo.local.367925496: reply ok 112 getattr DIR 40775 ids 1000/100 [|nfs]

14:14:02.068754 arp who-has peggyo.local tell bertha.local

14:14:02.068794 arp reply peggyo.local is-at 00:20:20:d3:20:55 (oui Unknown)

Once this happens, all network traffic drops to zero.

The ARP does not seem to happen when running nautilus (or the fvwm file manager it turns out) on the root NFS share so the GETATTR activity just goes on without end.

Similar activity is experienced in Ubuntu and Debian Sarge on the same client machine. The main difference is that in slack, the frequecy of GETATTR calls is much higher. I am running freerock gnome 2.10.2.

I'm thinking that this may be a NFS configuration problem on my part that is only an issue for Nautilus, but I don't know where to look next.

Any thoughts?