FreeBSD NFS client and Netware 6.5 NFS server

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Mar 02), Bob Johnson said:
> Message below is about a FreeBSD server I maintain.  The FreeBSD
> server is our web server.  We use NFS to talk to a Netware file
> server where most of our users' web pages are stored.  FreeBSD is
> 5.3, and was working ok with Netware 5.1 (and still is with other
> Netware servers).  One of the servers was recently upgraded to
> Netware 6.5 and NFS is no longer playing nice between the two.
> 
> When something on the Netware side updates a file by copying it into
> place (e.g. using FTP [don't complain] to upload a file), the FreeBSD
> client doesn't find out that the file contents have changed until it
> does something to the file (e.g. touch or chmod).  Thus, when one of
> our users updates their web page with something like Dreamweaver, the
> web server doesn't find out about it (perhaps it eventually finds
> out, but it takes more than the several minutes we waited).

It sounds sort of like the vfs.nfs.access_cache_timeout sysctl isn't
being honored on the FreeBSD side.  The kernel defaults to 60 seconds,
but if you have nfs_client_enable="YES" in rc.conf, /etc/rc.d/nfsclient
sets it to 2.  If you dump the NFS traffic as your web server fetches
one of these recently-updated files, do you see it doing an
ACCESS/GETATTR on the target files at all?

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com