NFS locking up
 

We're almost done migrating from an HP-UX 10.20 box to a RH AS2.1 server. I've been transfering data for almost a year via remoted mounted NFS file systems (RH AS2.1 remote mounts file systems that are on the HP-UX box). A couple weeks ago I pulled data from archive tape back to the HP-UX box, and went to do a copy to pull the files over to Linux like I normally would, but the copy freezes part way in and locks up. NFS just stops working and freezes. Afterwards I can't even cd into the remote directories, can't ls them or anything. Any command that tries to access the remote system freezes. I have to reboot the Linux server to clear it out. After the reboot, I can mount the remote file system, cd into it, list the files, and do a df on the file system with no problem. If I try to do the cp again, it freezes again and I have to reboot.

I of course can't just reboot this production server arbitrarily. I have to wait until off hours. This method has been working fine for about a year. Rebooting the remote server has no affect on frozen commands.

Are these machines on the same network or truly remote from one another? If remote, NFS is a bad idea. You should really use rsync to copy data to and from over the network and at least at minimal FTP would even be faster.