NFS Datastore keeps losing connectivity

[soulwaxer]

Please can someone help me. I have created a test bed using vmworksatation and have built two esx 4 servers. All is ok there I installed vc on a 2008 sp2 box and can connect ok. I have also installed Windows for unix on a 2003 r3 server and created an NFS share. My problem is I connect and create a new DS on a shared NFS drive. All seems ok and then I'm unable to connect to the DS becasue its inactive. Sometimes I can dismount sometimes I can't. The connection is intermitent and can restore as quick as it disconnections.

[fejf]

In short: don't use NFS on windoze...

I always get bad bahaviour with NFS on Windoze (speaking of win2k3r2 with sfu). After some minutes I get a complete loss of bandwidth and the performance is very poor (about 1/10th of a Linux NFS-Server on the same hardware). My tip: if it's possible setup a Linux server or VM for NFS. It's as easy as installing a linux distro and doing a: "mkdir /nfs && echo '/nfs *(rw,no_root_squash,async,no_subtree_check)' >> /etc/exports && exportfs -r" (as user root without the "

--

There are 10 types of people. Those who understand binary and the rest. And those who understand gray-code.

[soulwaxer]

thanks for the response I'm pretty new to Linux which version do you recommend ?

[fejf · Accepted solution]

For beginners I'd recommend Ubuntu because it's maybe the beginner friendliest version (but the command above won't work ). But you can also try SuSE (either OpenSuSE or SLES) or RedHat (either CentOS or RHEL) because they are the linux-distros which are ment for enterprise-use.

I think they all bring graphical tools for NFS-configuration.

--

There are 10 types of people. Those who understand binary and the rest. And those who understand gray-code.

[soulwaxer]

many thanks for your help I have installed Ubuntu and I'm just looking at NFS do you know any useful web sites on configuring NFS.

[fejf]

Short answer: google

Long answer: try this one:

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/nfs-server-and-client-configuration-in-ubuntu.html

One warning though: if you are not familiar with the "vi"-editor perhaps replace the vi in the commandlines with gedit or kedit. You can also use the following two commands:

sudo su

mkdir /nfs && echo '/nfs *(rw,no_root_squash,async,no_subtree_check)' >> /etc/exports && exportfs -r

This creates the dir /nfs and exports it for all hosts - if you want to export it for only specific hosts use something like:

echo '/nfs 10.1.1.10/255.255.255.255(rw,no_root_squash,async,no_subtree_check)' >> /etc/exports

echo '/nfs 10.1.1.0/255.255.255.0(rw,no_root_squash,async,no_subtree_check)' >> /etc/exports

fejf

--

There are 10 types of people. Those who understand binary and the rest. And those who understand gray-code.

[soulwaxer]

one last help.

I have a drive in my external harddrive called NFSshare. I cannot add this to my exports file what would be the right command. I want to give access to any server on my 192.168.178 address range. When I tried to add the command to my export file i get E486 pattern not found.

can you help