The ECN No Name Newsletter is no longer being published. This is an archived issue.
[previous article] [next article]You are working on your thesis and just about finished the final edits to the page headers. You send out a command to preview your document on your slick diskless Sun workstation, and then, without warning, this pops onto your console:
NFS server 'machine-name' not responding, still trying...
Fortunately, this is NO cause for alarm. This message is simply informing you that your client has temporarily lost communication with your disk server. Your file is sitting safely in your client's memory. Most of the time, the system will reestablish communication within a minute or two, and respond with:
NFS server 'machine-name' OK
Sometimes it will not. In these instances, there is most likely a problem with the machine that was named. It may be down, or simply very busy. If you wait for more than about 15 minutes, then the machine mentioned is probably hung or rebooting. If this is the case, then you may wish to call the UNIX Hot-Line (49-4- UNIX) and report the problem.
The reason most of our Suns are diskless is so that we can have centralized disk systems. As with every solution, there are pros and cons to file-servers. The biggest pro is that instead of having a copy of the UNIX operating system on EVERY Sun workstation's disk drive, we make one copy and place it in a central location that every machine can access. We reduce duplicated data by a huge factor. The con to this is that if that central location becomes unreachable (the machine goes down, the network connection is broken, etc) then all the machines depending on that data are cutoff and helpless until that resource becomes available again.
We have researched the topic for several years and found, through practical experience, that the current solution (Network File System, or, as it is referred to: NFS) is the most feasible and safe for us at this time.
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