NFS Problems on A/UX 2.0

[maples at ddtisvr]

	Just to add a little fuel to the fire on the topic of NFS...
We are a large development shop, running close to 100 A/UX boxes off
of central Sun NFS file servers.  The average size of an executable
here is over 3MB.
	We had been having rather severe NFS problems for a long time.
It was the usual story of bad linking phase when source and target were
both on remote disks.  Our temporary solution was to do a nightly build
on a A/UX client locally.  This usually took about 15 hours.  This allowed
us to do further investigation into the problem.
	We first discovered that whereas A/UX 1.0 and 1.1 supported old
style 16K ethernet cards, 2.0 did not.  So, we began the process of 
upgrading to 64K cards.  As long as the compile machines had 64K cards and
the other workstations did not, the compile machines could do a remote
build.  However, the 16K user stations got NFS timeouts and getattr errors.
As we upgraded more and more machines to 64K, we discovered more and more
machines could not compile.  When we finished upgrading all machines to
the 64K cards, we were back to doing nightly builds on clients locally.
	At the same time, we had been pursuing NFS patches from sun.  
We discovered that there were major problems with NFS under Sun OS 4.0.3
as far as A/UX was concerned.  We had cut down on these problems by
shifting packet read/write sizes to 1024, but this was not a solution.
Eventually, we upgraded our servers to sun os 4.1.1, and the link phase
started working reliably for the first time in literally months.

	My overall conclusion from this 'learning experience' is this:
Apple's implementation of NFS does have problems.  Apple knows about it.
Apple does not know how to fix it.  Only by getting more flexible s/w
from Sun were we able to get up and running.  Sun's reputation for
support in the industry is generally poor, but I got much better response
from them than Apple.  Apple spent a lot of time trying to tell me that
the problem was in administrator inexperience, not trying to duplicate
or solve the problem.

	It's my personal belief that A/UX is a great product.  My 
employer likes Apple A/UX enough to build a multi-million dollar
product for it.  However, Apple simply does not have a strong support
structure in place.  Time after time, you'll be left to solve problems
on your own.  If you can live with this, go for it.  If not, think
real hard about using it for serious development.


Greg Maples                      | These are my opinions, not yours. Keep your
Systems Group Leader             | hands off 'em. They're also not the opinions
DuPont Design Technologies       | of my employer or yours. So there. (c) 1990
maples%ddtisvr at uunet.uu.net      | The preceding is an opinion which is mine.
-- 
Greg Maples                      | These are my opinions, not yours. Keep your
Systems Group Leader             | hands off 'em. They're also not the opinions
DuPont Design Technologies       | of my employer or yours. So there. (c) 1990
maples%ddtisvr at uunet.uu.net      | The preceding is an opinion which is mine.