[NTLUG:Discuss] Need advice for mirroring home directories

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 05:03:13PM -0600, Chris Cox wrote:
> Lance Simmons wrote:
> > I've been using NFS on my wireless network at home so that my wife and
> > kids can have access to their /home directory from different machines.
> > They sometimes complain about the performance.  After ignoring their
> > complaints for awhile, I've looked at the evidence (e.g., GNOME or KDE
> > hanging for 30 seconds up to a couple of minutes at a time), and it
> > seems they have a point: there do seem to be times when there are
> > serious lag problems because of using the NFS /home directory on another
> > machine.
> 
> Something is just wrong.  Should not be seeing those kinds of hangs.
> Shouldn't see any.
> 
> There can be file locking issues using NFS... but I doubt you're
> seeing that.

NFS often has trouble with hostname resolution, especially doing reverse
IP address mapping.  The server will hang for a while as it tries to 
figure out the hostname of whatever client is connecting.  

We had this problem from time to time at one of our sites -- especially 
when the site lost its connectivity to the root nameservers and 
couldn't resolve the in-addr.arpa. domain.

So, you might see if the NFS server is hanging on IP address
resolution or DNS queries.

Pm