🚀 go-pugleaf

We're using a 4 processor Sequent Symmetry system as a NFS server for
various systems (Sun 3s, Sun 4s, Sun 386s, etc) around campus.  Our
campus network has different areas divided into subnets with each
subnet served by a cisco router, and the routers connected by a fiber
optic backbone. 

On occasion (more often than we'd like), the client systems will start
printing messages about the NFS server not responding.  This goes on
for about 45 seconds or so, and then the client can talk to the server
again.  We don't see this on Suns that are on the same subnet as the
Sequent server, which could indicate it's a network problem.  The
problem is that we don't really know how to go about figuring out
whether it's a network problem or a problem with the Sequent or
Sequent's NFS product.  We've tried playing with the NFS timeout and
retransmission values, but we haven't been very successful in curing the
problem without using somewhat high values (timeouts of 2 seconds and
retransmissions set to 9).

If anyone has any experience with Sequent's NFS product they'd like to
relate or on how we can figure out where the problem is, please let me
know. 


Thanks in advance,

Mike Iglesias
University of California, Irvine