NFS - Shares (File Caching Problem)
 

Hello,

I am currently working with egenera blade servers that use NFS-Shares and iplanet web servers. Currently we are having a problem where updates to nfs shares do not get written to the iplanets consistently.

In most cases when we update a file on NFS-Shares it will get written to one or two of the three iplanets. This forces us to manually update the iplanet servers with the new files.

Is there a way to either force the cached files to be flushed from the iplanet server or is there a way disable the file caching altogether. My boss has requested that file caching be disabled, but either solution will do.

Thank you,
Shawn:

Might try using "sync" on the servers, either the option in fstab (to disable caching altogether) or the CLI utility with same name (to force delayed writes to disk.) I'm not familiar with egenera blade servers though.

Crito,

Thanks for the info. I do not believe that using "sync" is what we want to do. Do you know which options need to be set in fstab to disale caching?

Thanks,
Shawn

Here's a sample line from mine:
/dev/sda1 /mnt/removable auto user,sync,noatime,noauto,umask=0 0 0

The synchronous I/O option prevents delayed writes and read-ahead. I'm using it because the drive is removable and I don't want locks held. I sort of doubt your problem is caching though, to be honest. More likely a problem with whatever process is replicating the data across your servers.

Thanks Citro,

I will take a look at it Monday when I get back to work.

-Shawn