[Techtalk] I guess I should panic now

[Conor Daly]

On Mon, May 13, 2002 at 11:10:58PM +0100 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Conor Daly thought:
> 
> I have had one or
> two hangs in testing that felt like NFS failures.  Is there a better
> network filesystem available?

I think I have the NFS hangs figured.  The machines all have 
Intel EtherExpress 16 NICs using the eexpress.o module and they're not
behaving well.  The various comments out there on the internet suggest
that these cards are not very nice, don't work well with linux and are
particularly poor when (not) working with NFS.  The comments in the source
even complain about the card.  I'm having problems where I'm exporting
OpenOffice.org directories over NFS and whenever I click a "help" button,
the window frame appears but OOo then freezes.  I get errors in the syslog
of

eth0: tx interrupt but no status
last message repeated 28 times
last message repeated 11 times
last message repeated 11,376,241.5 times :-)

next thing is to try a different NIC and see if things improve.  Trouble
is, if things _do_ improve, I'm going to need to buy 30 new NICs!

Oh no, bummer!  I put in an RTL 8139 Fast Ethernet NIC using the 
8139too.o module and everything worked like a dream!  Now I'm going to 
have to dump all the EtherExpress 16 cards and buy RTLs for about EUR350 
for the full network!  AARRRRGGHHH!!!!!

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
---------------------
Faenor.cod.ie
 12:13am  up 24 days,  5:52,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Hobbiton.cod.ie
 11:21pm  up 22 days, 13:47,  2 users,  load average: 0.20, 0.30, 0.40