NFS hangs on graphical login

jbuchana_at_buchanan1.net
Date: 09/18/03 

Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2003 15:38:58 GMT

I've got a problem that has not yielded to my normal process of
Googling for hours, reading man pages, and asking the guys at work.

I recently installed RedHat 9 on my Toshiba laptop which uses a
Netgear FA411 PCMCIA ethernet card.

The installation went perfectly, and networking came up with no
problems at all.

Local accounts can log in graphically using Gnome, KDE, or Icewm (added
to the GDM menu myself). No problem.

When I have it connected to my home LAN, and start up NIS and autofs,
like the rest of mu home machines, there is a problem. Accounts with
their home directories on the file server work fine when I log into
them from a virtual console. No problem at all. I can also ssh into
them from another machine on the network and work with them for a long
time.

But as soon as I try to log into one of these network-homed accounts
graphically from the GDM login menu, the login freezes.

When I switch back to the VC, any sessions open for this user are
frozen as well. The /var/log/messages file says "NFS server hobbes not
responding". There are no error messages in the /var/log/messages file
on hobbes.

Oddly enough, *another* network-homed user with their home on the same
user can still log in on a VC with no problem.

At this point, nothing I've tried can salvage the login sessions or
mount points. kill, fuser -k, gdm-restart, nothing. It's reboot
time. Sometime the reboot hangs and I have to resort to the power
switch.

As I mentioned, I've Googled this quite a bit, and the closest things
I've found are suggestions to pass the "nolock", "nfsvers=2", and
"rsize=1024,wsize=1024" as local options to the automounter. These were
actually suggestions for NFS freezing under other circumstances.

I was already using "nolock", and "nfsvers=2" did
nothing. "rsize=1024,wsize=1024" actually sometimes delays the lockup
a little while, but does not stop it. I tried 512, but no better. I
suspect these low numbers will yield poor NFS performance in any case.

Sorry the post went on so long, but I wanted to be thorough...

Anyone have any suggestions? 

-- 
Jim Buchanan                                      jbuchana@buchanan1.net
=================== http://www.buchanan1.net/ ==========================
"And the band played on, while the helicopters whirred,
 Drunk on the lawn in a nuclear dawn, my senses finely blurred"
 -Moxy Fruvous
================= Visit: http://www.thehungersite.com ==================

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