On 6/22/06, Tony Schreiner schreian@bc.edu wrote:

This may not be a CentOS problem, because I'm in a mixed environment. But I put it out in case anybody has any thoughts.

I recently replaced a file server, which was on a Pentium III based system running 32-bit CentOS 4.3, with an Opteron based system running Fedora 4. The NFS clients are all CentOS 4.3, some are 32 bit and some are 64 bit.

Since the replacement, when I try to write a big file from the 32bit CentOS boxes over NFS to the server, I get "filesize exceed messages" at 2GB. However this used to work with the old server. And I can write big files if I'm logged on to the server.

One more oddity, the shared file system on the server is xfs formatted; if I instead mount a reiserfs file system I can successfully write. This part does not make sense to me.

And one more, I can write large files from a 32-bit Fedora 4 system to the server over NFS, just not from 32-bit CentOS.

I'm exporting with (rw,async) and mounting with (bg,rsize=8192,wsize=8192)

Is there some interaction between nfs and xfs that I need to know about?

I don't know whether this is your problem or not, but when we upgraded our desktops to RHEL4-U3 (boxes were running RH9 or RHEL3), we noticed weirdness with NFS. Our developers use NFSs between their desktops and embedded Linux boxes. Worked without a hitch before the latest nfs in RHEL4. The problem turned out to be that the newer NFS was overrunning the (very minimal) buffers in the embedded Linux boxes. We had to use rsize=1024,wsize=1024. Without the transfer size limitations the transfer would terminate at exactly 16384 bytes.

HTH,