edubuntu + nfs

[antonello facchetti]

Karl Goetz wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-10-02 at 20:58 +0200, Antonello Facchetti wrote:
>   
>> I set up a school lab with 15 pcs and edubuntu 7.04.
>>
>> A PC exports /home via nfs to the others.
>>
>> I've got a problem when a class get into the lab and all the computers 
>> boot practically at the same time  (typical situation): some computers 
>> do not get the /home dir so users can't log on.
>>
>> The only solution is to boot the computers sequentially, one by one, 
>> waiting about 30 seconds between  each one.
>>
>> I tried to mount manually in a console the /homes and it takes seconds 
>> (about 5-10) to have a result.
>>
>> Is there any misconfiguration I my have done? (really, I just edited the 
>> exports file)
>> What should I check to speed up the process?
>>     
>
> you might need to increase the number of nfs threads running (if you
> can), and or increase the timeout for connects.
> kk
>
>   
>> Antonello
>>
>>     
After a long time busy with something else I returned to this issue and 
I found out something more.

The situation:
1 edubuntu 7.4 server acting as
- file server for 10 edubuntu 7.4 pcs
- ltsp server for 6 thin clients
ltsp is ok, nfs server has the problems described above

First I tried tweaking the /etc/fstab
last versions were:
192.168.0.11:/home /home nfs  
rw,hard,intr,nfsvers=3,tcp,timeo=600,rsize=32768,wsize=32768 0 0
or
192.168.0.11:/home /home nfs  
rw,hard,intr,nfsvers=3,tcp,timeo=600,rsize=1024,wsize=1024 0 0
I tried changing rsize and wsize but with no success.

I wanted to increase the instances of nfsd but I really didn't find out 
how.

So I tried to cope with the problem in a completely different way:
I had an old spare computer (pII) with an old red-hat 7.3 and about 10Gb 
HD (enough for the /home dir) working as a samba server.
In it:
- copied the whole /home directory from the edubuntu server,
- added nfs functionality, increasing nfsd instances up to 32 
(/etc/sysconfig/nfs).
On the edubuntu clients:
- removed the lines from /etc/fstab
- added a "mount -t nfs 192.168.0.11./home /home" in /etc/init.d/rc.local
and now everything's ok!

I am happy for the success, but I'd really like to understand the reason 
:-)

btw - this works with the rh7.3 pII old server, but doesn't work this 
the edubuntu 7.04 server: even with the "rc.local" tweak clients can't 
mount /home properly.

Antonello