Hi Frank.

I'm suspecting your network or your network adapter or the driver you use. Can you try to transfer big file (>10Mo) between your file server and your centos ? Using another protocol like : ftp, sftp, scp, http ? Can you connect your centos on a different network plug, using a different cable ? Can you install an other network adapter ?

On 9/22/07, Frank Cox theatre@sasktel.net wrote:

I have a weird NFS problem here.

I am trying to set up a machine with Centos 5 on it. First time I've tried Centos, but it looks like it's going to be the real thing for some machines that I look after that are intended to be long-term "just works" application servers. I plan to start reading and participating in this mailing list now, so Hello to everyone! My name is Frank Cox and I own and operate the Melville Theatre in Melville Saskatchewan, Canada.

My first attempt to install Centos 5 was from ISO files that I put on my fileserver, which is the method that I use to install Fedora. Boot off a boot CD, point it to the appropriate directrory on the fileserver, and let 'er rip.

That didn't work this time. I got to the point where I told the boot CD where to find the ISO files on the fileserver, and the whole thing hung up. I found an error message on one of the consoles that said something to the effect of "server fileserver not responding, still trying". And that's as far as I got. I tried this a half-dozen times with the same result.

I thought maybe it just didn't like my fileserver for some reason, so I put the ISO files on another of my computers and set up an NFS share on that computer.

Same thing again.

I gave up and put Centos 5 onto CD's, booted from CD number 1 and just swapped CD's until I'm done. I thought that solved everything but now I have something even weirder.

I mounted my fileserver like this:

mount fileserver:/nas/NASDisk-00002/files /mnt/fileserver

That's exactly the same way that I mount it on my Fedora machines.

The fileserver mounts without error, and it appears at first glance to work. I can "cd /mnt/fileserver/where-ever" and use ls to view the files that are in the directories.

However, if I try to read the files on the fileserver, my terminal hangs up. All I can do is view the directories on my fileserver. Doing anything that reads any file on the fileserver locks up my terminal.

Logging in again from another terminal and viewing /var/log/messages tells me this:

nfs: server fileserver not responding, still trying

This appears to be the same problem that I had when I was installing the operating system. Normally if the installer can't find the NFS share due to a typo or whatever, it just tells me "Can't find the images" and that's all there is to it. But the installer hung up at the point where it was supposed to start reading the images so I think it could find them but couldn't read them either.

This exact same procedure works fine from my Fedora machines.

What in the world is going on here? If I can't get NFS to work on this machine I'm going to be up the creek because I use LTSP on it to run several terminals.

I haven't tried web browsing from that machine yet, but the ethernet card is obviously working because I did a "yum update" and a few "yum installs" with no problem. It is an Intel motherboard and CPU with integrated everything.

I strongly suspect that I'm doing something stupid here and can't see the obvious. Can someone give me a steer?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

-- MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Melville Sask ~ http://www.melvilletheatre.com _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos