[comp.sys.sun] NFS through routers & turning on UDP checksums in NFS?

buc@jessica.stanford.edu (Robert Richards) (12/18/90)

Is NFS mounting safe through routers? A traditional objection has been
that most NFS implementations don't use checksums on their UDP datagrams,
so that packets damaged by routers would cause undetected corrupt data for
users.

Is there some standard way of turning on UDP checksums in the common NFS
implementations (eg SunOS, Ultrix, etc), both client and server?

ehrlich@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu (Dan Ehrlich) (12/30/90)

In article <884@brchh104.bnr.ca> buc@jessica.stanford.edu (Robert Richards) writes:

> Is NFS mounting safe through routers? A traditional objection has been
> that most NFS implementations don't use checksums on their UDP datagrams,
> so that packets damaged by routers would cause undetected corrupt data for
> users.

> Is there some standard way of turning on UDP checksums in the common NFS
> implementations (eg SunOS, Ultrix, etc), both client and server?

We have NFS partition that are accessed across multiple routers with out
any problems.  One thing we did end up doing was to reduce the read and
write sizes to 1K for these partitions.  Otherwise there is a high
probability the gateway will have to fragment the request.  Not too sure
about how to enable UDP checksumming.  Seem to remember that there is a
variable one needs to change with adb to make it happen.  I would need to
go look at the sources.

Dan Ehrlich - Sr. Systems Programmer - Penn State Computer Science
<ehrlich@cs.psu.edu>/Voice: +1 814 863 1142/FAX: +1 814 865 3176