[CentOS] Intermittent NFS problems with NetApp server

Ross Walker rswwalker at gmail.com
Wed Mar 11 22:50:54 UTC 2009


On Mar 11, 2009, at 5:23 PM, Alfred von Campe <alfred at von-campe.com>  
wrote:

> I've been experiencing some intermittent problems accessing at NetApp
> server via NFS and automount.  I'm running CentOS 5.2 (fully updated)
> on all my servers and workstations.  Usually, everything is working
> just fine, when suddenly we get the following error:
>
>   /bin/sh: /home/epd/srcref/swtools/Crontabs/
> run_release_requests.sh: Permission denied
>
> This is actually an email from cron because we try to run that shell
> script every minute (yes, the crontab entry is * * * * * /home/epd/
> srcref/swtools/Crontabs/run_release_requests.sh), and /home/epd is an
> automounted directory.  Here is its map entry:
>
>   epd -rw,nointr,rsize=32768,wsize=32768 XXXXXX:/epd
>
> When this is happening, other users can successfully access that
> directory on the server.  The directory is actually mounted
> correctly, and unmounting doesn't fix the issue.  Furthermore, the
> same user that is being denied access, can successfully access that
> directory on a different server.  The problem usually lasts about 20
> minutes and then resolves itself.  We have been pulling our hair out
> trying to debug this problem, because it's intermittent and the debug
> window is fairly short.
>
> Recently we have been getting help from one of the NetApp admins, and
> he ran a command on the NetApp that produced the following warning:
>
>   The TCP receive window advertised by NFS client XXXXXXX is 5888.
>   This is less than the recommended value of 32768 bytes.
>   You should increase the TCP receive buffer size for NFS on the
> client.
>
> Some googling around got me to check these values for TCP:
>
>   # sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_mem
>   net.ipv4.tcp_mem = 98304        131072  196608
>   # sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_rmem
>   net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4096        87380   4194304
>   # sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_wmem
>   net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 4096        16384   4194304
>
> So these seem fine to me (i.e., the max is greater than 32768).  Is
> there an NFS (as opposed to TCP) setting I should be tweaking?  Any
> ideas why the NetApp is issuing those warnings?  Any other
> suggestions on how to debug this problem?

Run a headers only tcpdump of the NFS mount from mount to when the  
problem occurs, then use wireshark to analyze it.

Maybe page cache is putting too much pressure on tcp buffering so you  
need to increase the minimum buffer size?

-Ross




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