Big trouble with nfs

[Markus.Grunwald@pruftechnik.com]

Hello,

Some days ago, I set up a debian testing box (call it "client") for 
software development. It imports many directories from a SuSE linux box ( 
call it "server")  via nfs. One of them is /home, mounted like this from 
fstab:

server:/home   /home   nfs   rw,hard,intr,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,nolock   0 
      0

My big problem is, that sometimes (mostly when lots of data is 
transferred, like during linking a big project) a process that wants to 
access data from /home gets into state "D uninterruptible sleep" and never 
wakes up again. All consecutive tries to access home end up like that , 
too. In the line from fstab, you can see that I suspected file locking and 
added "nolock", but without success.

I found no way of getting rid of this, so I allways have to reboot the 
machine :(. This is not only bad for the uptime, but costs valuable time 
of our developers. 

The client is a quite up to date debian testing:
uname -a:
Linux client 2.4.27-2-386 #1 Thu Jan 20 10:55:08 JST 2005 i686 GNU/Linux

The server is a not very up to date SuSE 8.2:
uname -a
Linux server 2.4.29 #3 Mon Feb 14 15:07:10 CET 2005 i686 unknown unknown 
GNU/Linux

I don't know if it is the fault of client or server. All I know is that I 
need some help urgently...

TIA

Markus Grunwald
Softwareentwicklung

PRÜFTECHNIK Condition Monitoring GmbH
Oskar-Messter-Straße 19-21
85737 Ismaning
www.pruftechnik.com
Tel: +49 (0)89 99616177
Fax: +49 (0)89 99616200