Having trouble with NFSROOT's robustness to network problems

[CrazyCasta]

I've installed a diskless install according to the instructions here. Everything seems great except that from time to time my system freezes. I've noticed this seems to happen most when there's lots of disk access. I've found that I can cause this problem by disconnecting the network cable, running ls, and then reconnecting the network cable (no long wait or anything). I'm guessing that something's happening to the mount, but I'm not sure what. The nfs version is 4. I've tried both udp and tcp protos and both fail (in the same way).

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[szatox]

Several clients with root on NFS can simply overload your LAN.
100 MB is only enough for 2 clients accessing disk at any time. And clients tend to access disk pretty often because they expect NFS shares to be changed from other location so they don't do much caching.

And yes, unpluging the wire will cause freez on client, because it needs to read the share again before performing whatever action you want.
Also, if NFS server's IP changes, it will break connection. Even if you mount using hostname, it will resolve name to IP and bind that IP rather than name.

[CrazyCasta]

Okay, that doesn't seem to answer my question.

• There's only one client at the moment.
  
• It's a gigabit connection.
  
• You make it sound like it should only temporarily stall when I unplug the wire. It's permanently frozen.
  
• And finally, the server's IP is static.