NFS Servers, deadlocks and symlinks

[elf@florence.buici.com]

I'll start with the question(s) for the impatient.  Is anyone
experiencing deadlocks between nfs-kernel-server and ext3?  How about
symlink errors using nfs-user-server?  There is nothing in the debian
bugs database about either of these problems.  Nor is there anything
about the ext3 deadlock in google.

Background.

I've been using the kernel server for nearly a year to provice NFS to
an NCD xterm.  It worked fine.  This afternoon, while experimenting
with Etherboot and it's need for an NFS server, a reiserfs partition I
was using refused to

  mv bin ..

where bin was a directory.  The machine deadlocked, forcing me to
reboot and wait 45 minutes while the raid fsck'd.  After the second go
at this, I decided it was time to enable journaling on the ext2
partitions.  The discovery was that when I enabled ext3 on the
partition that the NCD was NFS mounting to, the NFS mount would
deadlock the machine.  Switching to the nfs-user-server eliminated the
deadlock.  (A toast to apt-get.)

Starting back on the original project, the Etherboot finally succeeded
The next discovery was that the newly network-booted machine was
experiencing NFS errors complaining about too many symlinks.  It's
root filesystem is mounted from server:/tftpboot/seashore which is a
symlink to /a/dev/sde1/seashore.  I wouldn't expect this to be a
problem.  Should I?