I'll start with the question(s) for the impatient. Is anyone experiencing deadlocks between nfs-kernel-server and ext3? How about symlink errors using nfs-user-server? There is nothing in the debian bugs database about either of these problems. Nor is there anything about the ext3 deadlock in google.
Background. I've been using the kernel server for nearly a year to provice NFS to an NCD xterm. It worked fine. This afternoon, while experimenting with Etherboot and it's need for an NFS server, a reiserfs partition I was using refused to mv bin .. where bin was a directory. The machine deadlocked, forcing me to reboot and wait 45 minutes while the raid fsck'd. After the second go at this, I decided it was time to enable journaling on the ext2 partitions. The discovery was that when I enabled ext3 on the partition that the NCD was NFS mounting to, the NFS mount would deadlock the machine. Switching to the nfs-user-server eliminated the deadlock. (A toast to apt-get.) Starting back on the original project, the Etherboot finally succeeded The next discovery was that the newly network-booted machine was experiencing NFS errors complaining about too many symlinks. It's root filesystem is mounted from server:/tftpboot/seashore which is a symlink to /a/dev/sde1/seashore. I wouldn't expect this to be a problem. Should I?
