joe golden said: > > I was looking for advice on pitfalls to avoid. > best thing i can reccomend is just to test it out. the biggest drawback to nfs on linux is it seems very unreliable. up until recently i had my /home mounted via nfs to another system on the local lan at home(100mbit 48port switch). my machine was the only one using it. quite often it would error out. i wouldn't be able to load programs and when i tried 'cd' i would get ". not a directory". until i killed X and logged in on the console and unmounted/remounted the partition. for less used partitions it was never an issue. on /home it happened at least a few dozen times, on /usr/local which was also nfs it only happened once. both systems running linux 2.2.19 using kernel nfs server. at first i thought it was a reiserfs problem as ive heard nfs issues with that but i reformatted ext2 and it had the same problem(maybe moreoften too). i have 2 other partitions/exports with just data on them and it never happened to them.
linux isn't the only one though, i have solaris systems at work that suffer from a bug discovered back in 1999 that has to do with NFS dieing for no apparent reason and sun still hasn't been able to track it down .....(bugID 4191825 for those that are interested, i have the bug report tacked to my wall here) im gonna be looking into CODA real soon to see if its any good. i personally probably would not mount /usr unless im also mounting /var as well. even that probably won't gaurantee updates get installed properly.i have a bunch(~20) debian servers and currently upgrade them manually, i plan to put apt-get update ; apt-get -d upgrade in cron to speed up the process as i don't wantthe systems to auto upgrade that causes problems quite often(especially xinetd). i also have a script that ssh's to theservers and runs apt-get update apt-get upgrade so i don't have to manually ssh to each one to do it. nate
