Does NFS deamon require restart for configuration changes to take effect?

[mattlach]

Hey all,

Does it?

Otherwise I have a weird problem I can't wrap my head around.

My FreeNAS server has two NFS shares set up. One shares server storage traffic over a 10gig interface. This interface is dedicated to storage traffic, and is on a different subnet from the main interface which is used for connecting clients, web interface configuration and ssh.

The problem is with my main client share. My clients are a mix of linux, mac and windows machines. My Main desktop is on linux, and has for the longest time been set up to have two NFS shares over this client interface.

Yesterday, I added a second Linux client IP using the space delimited format called for on the share screen. I didn't change anything else, just added an IP to the "allowed IP addresses" section. The new linux client mounted the NFS share just fine.

Everything was hunky dory, until I noticed that my main Linux desktop all of a sudden no longer mounts its two NFS shares.

Odd, I thought, maybe I accidentally deleted a digit of the IP address in the "allowed IP addresses section". Nope, that checked out. Then I raised the NFS servers maximum allowed connections, just in case that was the problem. Hit save. Desktop still times out when trying to mount shares, without me ever changing anything on the client side...

The kicker is, the new client for which I added the IP address still connects just fine, as do both the servers on the internal storage traffic 10gig network...

The only thing I can think of that might be causing the problem is if the NFS daemon needs to be restarted after changing the number of allowed servers for it to take effect, but I can't test that theory right now, as I have some critical traffic from one of the servers to FreeNAS right now, and don't want to reset the link.

What do you guys think. Does changing the number of servers require a NFS daemon restart, or FreeNAS system reboot, or am I up against something else weird going on here?

Much obliged,
Matt

 

[solarisguy]

If your network is not sitting on Internet, can you temporarily just allow all the hosts to access your NFS server?

If that works, can you limit NFS sharing to your LAN (a network) instead of specifying individual hosts?

 

[mattlach]

If your network is not sitting on Internet, can you temporarily just allow all the hosts to access your NFS server?

If that works, can you limit NFS sharing to your LAN (a network) instead of specifying individual hosts?

Thanks,

Looks like it really just was a reboot (or restart of the NFS daemon) that was needed.

Now everything works!

--Matt

 

[solarisguy]

No reboot required, just toggle NFS ON-OFF-ON after the changes.

We had a discussion elsewhere in the forum, that when NFS is heavily used, and 10GbE indicates a really heavy use to me..., one should really up the number from suggested 4-6. How many do you have? 100?

 

[mattlach]

No reboot required, just toggle NFS ON-OFF-ON after the changes.

We had a discussion elsewhere in the forum, that when NFS is heavily used, and 10GbE indicates a really heavy use to me..., one should really up the number from suggested 4-6. How many do you have? 100?

It's actually a virtual 10gig vswitch that allows my FreeNas guest to share its storage with my other two server guests.

The separate physical NIC is a dual port gigabit NIC set up with LAGG.

I didn't realize that you had to specify server count, so it was at its default of 4.

Seeing that I have two servers and a few clients, that wasn't enough. I upped it to 12, and it appears to be working well.

I don't understand why the NFS daemon isn't just written to dynamically add servers as needed rather than needing to specify the number...


Anyway. It works now. I'm happy :p

 

[solarisguy]

Lucky you, virtual stuff has life on its own...

Up it to at least 32. It is less the number of client machines, and more the maximum number of simultaneous requests.

Don't understand why the NFS daemon isn't just written to dynamically add servers as needed rather than needing to specify the number...

Because it is not trivial to do so. There are some programing advances in other operating systems, but that is a fairly recent development.

 

[mattlach]

Will do. Thank you for the advice.

On review of my previous post, I need to pay more attention when posting from my phone. Holy typofest Batman! Going to ahve to edit it and fix it!

--Matt