gplan@umb.umb.edu (George Planansky) (10/03/89)
At our site we have a Sun 3/280 server for 6 diskless 3/60's, all running SunOS 4.01, and an Alliant Fx40 running its 4.3 BSD. About 1/2 of the 3/280's and the Alliant's disk spaces are nfs-mounted to the other machines. Several times a day, commands like "ls pathname" and "more pathname" fail to return anything but the next shell prompt, although the file of the pathname does exist. That is, I may do and see: sun[1]% pwd /home/sol/chem/gplan sun[2]% ls /home/sol/chem/sam/b2a.f sun[3]% cd /home/sol/chem/sam sun[4]% pwd /home/sol/chem/sam sun[5]% ls b2a.f and other files ... there sun[6]% cd sun[7]% pwd /home/sol/chem/gplan sun[8]% ls /home/sol/chem/sam/b2a.f b2a.f sun[9] % Typically, cd`ing to the directory in question re-enables ls, more, etc., and they work even from the original directory. A possibly related symptom: warnings about rpc timing out. And, file transfers from our 3/280's tape drive to the nfs-mounted Alliant disk space, aborting "spontaneously" after 40 or 50 megabytes, with plenty of room on disk. Could someone tell me what is happening, and, what to do about it? We have the sense that our diskless suns have too little memory, 4 MB, and that page swapping is grinding things down. But why should "ls", for one, return absolutely nothing? No "file not found" message, which is perhaps honest, but neither a "who knows?". George Planansky email: gplan@ra.umb.edu Atmosphere Environment Research Cambridge, MA (617) 547-6207