write problems with NFS and smbfs!

[Joerg Desch]

Two weeks ago, I had have a system crash. The motherboard has grilled the
hard-disc too, so I've bought a new PC and to try out Ubuntu.

On my old system, I've used Debian Woody together with WindowMaker.
Because of the good looking and clearly designed desktop, I've installed
Ubuntu beside the original Windoze XP. After some trouble with parted+grub
and XP's ideas about disc geometry, my workstation is up and running.

Our company uses an (old) server running Caldera 1.1 with kernel 2.0.36
(it's from 1998!) and Samba 1.9.18. The managing director says "never
change a running system ...", so the server is still up and running.
Because I'm the only one running linux on his PC, there is no way to
update!

After installation, I've simply restored my /etc/fstab entries to mount
the NFS exports. This works fine, but after writing to the project
directory, mc freezes. The same happens to all programs, trying to write
to the NFS mount. This is bad, but not bad enough. The written file is
damaged too. It is partly (first 40k) set to 0x00! :-(

There are no logged error messages on the server. The logs of my
workstation sometimes show the following message:

"nfs warning: mount version older than kernel"

At this point, it isn't possible to access the NFS mount anymore. Even the
read access freezes now.

I have to shutdown the system, to get it working again. The shutdown
messages sometimes shows the messages "RPC sendmsg returned error 101"!

The /etc/fstab entry looks like this:
artus:/home/jd /media/nfs/jd nfs rw,hard,intr,user,nosuid,exec 0 0

I've installed:
ii  mount          2.12-7ubuntu6  
ii  nfs-common     1.0.6-3ubuntu1


Because it's extremly important to get access to the companies server,
I've tried smbfs to mount the samba shares (used by the windows clients).

Thats the point to get frustrated. After successfully mounting the shares,
the write access ends up with an endless timeout. The "cvs co" of my
current projects need up to 5 minutes to complete!

mc don't tell me details, but cvs reports a input/output error:

  cvs checkout: cannot set time on v24_more.c: Input/output error \
    U bca-1/fujitsu/src/version.h

After looking a the local logs, I've found this message:

 Nov 22 08:04:32 anene kernel: smb_add_request: request [ce2a9e80, \
    mid=1797] timed out!

While tryind to edit or simply to copy files, I've also found this
message:

 Nov 22 09:41:14 anene kernel: smb_lookup: find src/version.h.~1.1.1.1.~ \
   failed, error=-512

 Nov 22 10:10:45 anene kernel: smb_trans2: invalid data, disp=0, \
    cnt=0, tot=0, ofs=0


The /etc/fstab entry for smbfs looks like this:

//artus/jd /media/smb/jd smbfs \
   uid=jd,gid=jd,fmask=664,username=jd,password=Geheim, \
   workgroup=WORKGROUP,noexec \
   0 0

I've tried to access a second server running Debian Woody with kernel
2.2.* and samba 2.2.3, but the problems are still the same.

I've found some other users running into the same trouble, but I have not
found any solutions.

-- 
Email: Joerg Desch <jd DOT vvd AT web DOT de>