Re: starting X interferes with NFS

[hendrik@topoi.pooq.com]

On Thu, Apr 13, 2006 at 11:15:20PM -0400, hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
> Yeah.  I've been trying to set up X on my ASUS A8N-VM-UAYGZ system.
> Its on-board graphics chip is, I believe, an GFORCE4 6300.  This 
> machine is successfully in production use as an NFS server, serving an 
> 80G reiser filesystem on LVM on RAID-1 to several other machines on the 
> LAN.
> 
> I'm using AMD64 etch with Len Sorenson's -12 kernel, and csail at MIT is 
> my package repository.  I've managed to compile and install the 
> so-called nvidia-kernel, but nvidia is not one of the options I get when 
> running dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg.
> 
> Selecting nv gets nowhere; when I boot, X tries to start 
> up and fails, finding no screens.  But more than that, when it starts 
> and fails on boot,  the NFS server doesn't seem to work.  
> remote-mounting the big partition on another machine times out.
> 
> Of the options I've tried, only vga works at all.  X still doesn't 
> start (apparently I've specified 24-bit graphics and VGA doesn't like 
> it), but at least the NFS server comes up properly, and my remote users 
> are happy.
> 
> Is this a known problem?
> 
> Actually, I'm not completely certain whether it was nv or vesa (or 
> both) I was using when the NFS server failed to operate -- I'd have to 
> try it again to be sure, but it's getting late and my users are 
> complaining about yet another shutdown.  I will test it again and give 
> more complete details, probably tomorrow.
> 
> In the meantime, if someone could tell me just what data to gather to 
> help in diagnosis, I'd appreciate it.
> 
> -- hendrik
> 

There are two issues here.

One, which I expect will be fixed by time, effort, routine upgrades, 
very much appreciated advice from this list, and a lot of my virtual 
elbow grease, is tht I'm having touble getting X up.

Th other, which I think is more serious, although it will probably 
affect me less, is that when C fails to start up properly at boot, it 
appears to disable the NFS server.  That seems to suggest
  * a serious lack of compartmentalisation in the kernel.
  * X's failure to behave properly when failing to start up.

-- hendrik