NFS Troubleshooting

If NFS is not working at all, try the following:

Make sure that the NFS server daemons are running. In particular, check for
statd, lockd, nfsd and rarpd. If the daemons are not running, they can be starte
d by running /etc/init.d/nfs.server start. See Daemons below for information on
NFS-related daemons.
Check the /etc/dfs/dfstab and type shareall.
Use share or showmount -e to see which filesystems are currently exported, a
nd to whom. showmount -a shows who the server believes is actually mounting whic
h filesystems.
Make sure that your name service is translating the server and client hostna
mes correctly on both ends. Check the server logs to see if there are messages r
egarding failed or rejected mount attempts; check to make sure that the hostname
s are correct in these messages.
Make sure that the /etc/net/*/hosts files on both ends report the correct ho
stnames. Reboot if these have to be edited.
If you are dealing with a performance issue, check
Network Issues
CPU Useage
Memory Levels
Disk I/O
Increase the number of nfsd threads in /etc/init.d/nfs.server if the problem
is that requests are waiting for a turn. Note that this does increase memory us
eage by the kernel, so make sure that there is enough RAM in the server to handl
e the additional load.
Where possible, mount filesystem with the ro option to prevent additional, u
nnecessary attribute traffic.
If attribute caching does not make sense (for example, with a mail spool), m
ount the filesystem with the noac option. If nfsstat reports a high getattr leve
l, actimeo may need to be increased (if the attributes do not change too often).
nfsstat reports on most NFS-related statistics. The nfsstat page includes in
formation on tuning suggestions for different types of problems that can be reve
aled with nfsstat.
If these steps do not resolve the issue, structural changes may be required:
cachefs can be used to push some of the load from the NFS server onto the NF
S clients. To be useful, cfsadmin should be used to increase maxfilesize for the
cache to a value high enough to allow for the caching of commonly-used files. (
The default value is 3 Mb.)
NFS Client
When a client makes a request to the NFS server, a file handle is returned. The
file handle is a 32 byte structure which is interpreted by the NFS server. Commo
nly, the file handle includes a file system ID, inode number and the generation
number of the inode. (The latter can be used to return a "stale file handle" err
or message if the inode has been freed and re-used between client file accesses.
)
If a response is not received for a request, it is resent, but with an increment
ed xid (transmission ID). This can happen because of congestion on the network o
r the server, and can be observed with a snoop session between server and client
.
The server handles retransmissions differently depending on whether the requests
are idempotent (can be executed several times without ill effect) or nonidempot
ent (cannot be executed several times). Examples of these would include things l
ike reads and getattrs versus writes, creates and removes. The system maintains
a cache of nonidempotent requests so that appropriate replies can be returned.
Daemons
The following daemons play a critical role in NFS service:
biod: On the client end, handles asynchronous I/O for blocks of NFS files.
nfsd: Listens and responds to client NFS requests.
mountd: Handles mount requests.
lockd: Network lock manager.
statd: Network status manager.