Apologies for the long email.
Setup: Two computers connected on 100Mb/s ethernet.
Fileserver (angus) RedHat Linux 9 with a custom compiled 2.6.2 kernel,
old I know but its only a PII 350 with 384MB RAM.
Shares files via nfs and samba to a desktop box (jersey) which dual
boots windows2k and LFS 5.0 running Gnome 2.8, yes a crack smoking
hand compiled source distribution.
Problem: On startup I have noticed that dhclient on jersey fails to
obtain an ip address on boot, watching angus boot NFS appears really
slow, plus dhcpd starts after nfs. I can rearrange the boot order
very easily, just a matter of renaming some symlinks.
However the nfs startup time is a worry. So I timed nfs startup ......
Investigations:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] mark]# time /etc/rc.d/init.d/nfs start
Starting NFS services: [ OK ]
Starting NFS quotas: [ OK ]
Starting NFS daemon: [ OK ]
Starting NFS mountd: [ OK ]
real 1m20.221s
user 0m0.126s
sys 0m0.073s
Looking through RedHats nfs startup script and repeating the timing
with the individual commands it appears as though exportfs is the
problem
[EMAIL PROTECTED] mark]# time exportfs -r
exportfs: No 'sync' or 'async' option specified for export
"192.168.10.0/255.255.255.0:/home".
Assuming default behaviour ('sync').
NOTE: this default has changed from previous versions
real 1m20.015s
user 0m0.003s
sys 0m0.007s
Documentation for reading the manpages for exportfs and exports the
sync versus async export options do not appear to explain a 1m20s
runtime. exportfs is a binary and not a script. So no further
drilling down for other commands (yes I have read the recent strace
discussion and will if need be try that approach just not with my
Gnome session and gconf residing on the nfs share in question!)
While reading the manpage for exportfs I got a bit curious, mountd
appears to maintain a list of servers currently authenticated to use
the shares stored in /var/lib/nfs/xtab and interestingly enough with
no other computers active on the network this file shows two entries
....
[EMAIL PROTECTED] mark]# cat /var/lib/nfs/xtab
/home
192.168.10.250(rw,sync,wdelay,hide,secure,no_root_squash,no_all_squash,subtree_check,secure_locks,mapping=identity,anonuid=-2,anongid=-2)
/home
192.168.10.252(rw,sync,wdelay,hide,secure,no_root_squash,no_all_squash,subtree_check,secure_locks,mapping=identity,anonuid=-2,anongid=-2)
Does having these two mystery entries effect startup performance,
maybee, how do I clean them out? Ok nfs gurus how do I strip these
out of the mountd's cache, hand edit the file /var/lib/nfs/xtab?
Everything appears to be in compliance with
http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/server.html
Any and all suggestions greatly appreciated.
Mark Carey
