Hi,
I have one old spare PC, a PIII with 128 MB RAM, that I use as a spare file server. I have a headless CentOS 5 install on it, and a 2 terabyte external USB harddisk. The machine is in my basement (because it's quite loud), and I'm using what's called "CPL" here (Courant Porteur), which is basically Ethernet over 220V power lines. It's much slower than normally cabled Ethernet, but it works OK.
I setup an NFS server on this machine, with the big 2TB storage on the external disk. On the first floor, on my main PC, I setup a consistent mounting of the NFS shares in /etc/fstab, and it works.
Now here's the problem. Some of the files are quite big, usually movie files that can make up to 4 GB. More often than not, when I cut/paste such a file from my local harddisk to the server, it's quite slow (understandably, due to the slow CPL connection), but then the operation freezes in the middle, the cursor is unresponsive, even [Ctrl+Alt+Backspace] doesn't work, and I have to do a hard reboot.
Now I wonder what this phenomenon can be due to. Some strange bottleneck effect due to either lack of RAM to the server or the slow network or both?
Any ideas?
Niki