Hi!
I am setting up some shares between two debian sarge boxes, one server and one client. Things were doing well, until I realized I couldn't transfer files from the client to the server. After some experimenting, I figured I could rename/remove dirs and files in the server without problems. Also, I could transfer files smaller than 32k. But when the file was bigger than 32k, the transfer would hang and the program stop responding. From this point, I wasn't able to unmount the share.
After more reading and trying, I found that setting the mount option to only use tcp would solve the problem, but it lowers the performance significantly.

Do you guys have any clue?

Some output:

bruno@frank:~$ cat /proc/mounts |grep nfs
192.168.0.5:/home/bruno /mnt/gigante-home-bruno nfs rw,v3,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,hard,intr,tcp,lock,addr=192.168.0.5 0 0
192.168.0.5:/data /mnt/gigante-data nfs rw,v3,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,hard,intr,tcp,lock,addr=192.168.0.5 0 0


bruno@frank:~$ rpcinfo -p gigante
program vers proto port
100000 2 tcp 111 portmapper
100000 2 udp 111 portmapper
100024 1 udp 827 status
100024 1 tcp 830 status
100003 2 udp 2049 nfs
100003 3 udp 2049 nfs
100003 4 udp 2049 nfs
100003 2 tcp 2049 nfs
100003 3 tcp 2049 nfs
100003 4 tcp 2049 nfs
100021 1 udp 1044 nlockmgr
100021 3 udp 1044 nlockmgr
100021 4 udp 1044 nlockmgr
100021 1 tcp 1086 nlockmgr
100021 3 tcp 1086 nlockmgr
100021 4 tcp 1086 nlockmgr
100005 1 udp 897 mountd
100005 1 tcp 900 mountd
100005 2 udp 897 mountd
100005 2 tcp 900 mountd
100005 3 udp 897 mountd
100005 3 tcp 900 mountd


thanks!

I once ran into a problem like this, but it was on an HPUX client with a Linux server, so this advice may or may not help. What I wound up doing is setting the rsize and wsize to smaller than default values as apparently NFS was choking on larger packets. This will also reduce performance, but perhaps not as much as switching to TCP. Though if performance isn't really critical, using TCP anyway seems to be the recommended course of action, based on what I've read.

Hi btmiller,
Thanks for writing. I tried the suggestion, and ended up finding that, oddily, my system appears to like more the smaller values for both rsize and wsize.
Now I can save files in the server, and using udp. But performance is so so... Iptraf tells me speed is around 450kbytes/s.

/etc/fstab:

# nfs
192.168.0.5:/home/bruno /mnt/gigante-home-bruno nfs rw,hard,intr,rsize=2048,wsize=1024,tcp,udp 0 0