[SLUG] "Pinging" on NFS mounts

From: Paul M Foster (paulf@quillandmouse.com)
Date: Mon Sep 18 2006 - 01:03:43 EDT


I've got three directories mounted from a server, via NFS. They're set
up in /etc/fstab with the following options:

soft,intr,timeo=12,wsize=8192,rsize=8192

I also have the switch that connects these two boxes in front of me, so
I can see the traffic between them. Every second or so, there's a
conversation between these two machines. Tcpdump says they're talking to
each other, one on port 799, the other on port 2049, and the packets are
UDP packets. I can't tell how many packets pass per "cycle", but it's a
few, and for every packet there's a send and reply, one machine sending,
the other replying.

(FWIW, one of those directories is the repository of a bunch of local
(to the LAN) websites, which we use to handle accounting, statistics and
such. The pages are PHP and static (no Ajax or anything). Most of the
pages draw their data from a PostgreSQL database. And I see activity
across the switch even when no one is working on the websites. I don't
think this is relevant, but I thought I'd mention it.)

My question is, given the nature of NFS and the options under which I've
mounted it, does anyone know why this constant chatter is going on?

-- 
Paul M. Foster
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked
Knowledge Systems (NKS).  Views and opinions expressed in messages
posted are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
official policy or position of NKS or any of its employees.



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 17:21:19 EDT