[kwlug-disc] NFS Setups (was Re: setting up a samba network with no windows systems?)

[Andrew Kohlsmith (Mailing List Account)]

On October 18, 2009 07:08:08 am john at netdirect.ca wrote:
> We see Samba as a windows integration tool. When there are no windows
>  systems we've never used it. NFS is more seamless. And suits it better.

I use NFS as well, but I'm always curious as to tuning for NFS performance.  I 
know to play around with rsize/wsize to find the "sweet spot" for transfer 
speeds, but do you have any words of wisdom from your experience as to making 
it really shine?

tcp vs udp -- is there a real benefit to one over the other? udp sounds like 
it'd be faster just because you don't have the connection setup/teardown and I 
would assume that the data integrity's being done at the application level 
irrespective of whether the protocol is reliable or not.

rsize/wsize -- my own experience seems to show that 8k blocks are about right, 
even though this would involve fragmentation on everything but jumbo-framed 
gig-e networks.

nolock -- I use this on read-only shares (mythtv media) -- may be a little 
faster at the cost of potential corruption on reads as the writers change 
what's there, but in my experience never a problem for media.  :-)

soft -- I almost always use this since NFS is anal about not letting me get 
rid of a mount if I've taken the laptop to work and forgotten to umount first 
(laptop's an NFS server).  Does soft mounting have any performance penalties?

v3 vs v4 -- I've no idea here...

> We use automount at the office to automount NFS shares. It's pretty
>  seamless. We have all of our home dirs on an nfs share and authenticate
>  via ldap. Since we also have a few windows systems (sales people) we also
>  use Samba on the same file system. The linux boxes use NFS and the windows
>  boxes use Samba. They never cross over.

What do you use to implement the directory integration? I've seen a few over 
the years but with my (tiny) home network I've never bothered. I would like to 
take a closer look at it though and would prefer looking at something that 
someone knowlegable has already green-lighted for various reasons.

-A.