Re: [gentoo-user] Serious stability problems, including freezes

[Roy Wright <roy@wright.org>]

On Jun 3, 2009, at 1:17 AM, Florian Philipp wrote:

> Alexander Puchmayr schrieb:
>> Hi there!
>>
>> My freshly setup homeserver has serious stability problem, which  
>> make the
>> the machine absolutely unuseable as home server.
>>
> [...]
>>
>> The problem is, when I copy large amount of data via nfs to the  
>> server, then
>> the logs get filled with entries like this:
>>
>> The second problem is that the network controler (rtl8169) seems to  
>> timeout
>> on TX, which is very bad if it happens during renewing your dhcp- 
>> lease :-(
>> the message looks like
>>
>> The worst thing however is an occasional freeze of the whole  
>> system, which
>> happens very likely when there is high network load over nfs. If that
>> happens, I have a blank console, no network, no keyboard, nothing.  
>> Not even
>> sysrq seems to work, which makes it pretty hard to tell what has  
>> happened.
>> After resetting the machine, there is nothing suspicious in the  
>> logs (it
>> just ends).
>>
>> Does anyone have suggestions?
>>
>
> Do you have a spare network adapter, maybe an older 100MBit PCI card?
> Maybe we should rule out a hardware fault on your ethernet chipset  
> first.
>

I had a similar issue over a year ago.  My problem turned out to be  
the switch I
was connecting to was bad.  I didn't discover this until I physically  
ran a 50ft
cable between the two computers just to rule out my infrastructure.   
Surprise. :)

Just for grins, here's my nfs mount options:

-rsize=8192,wsize=8192,soft,timeo=30,rw

My main gentoo box is down at the moment (power supply being RMA'd), but
I recall I had to set the unsecure option so my macbook could connect.

HTH,
Roy