Linux Out, FreeBSD In

“Don’t let the title scare you. This is only on my main file
server, which holds both shared material (source tarballs and
update packages) and 116G of movie files. It has recently begun to
mis-behave under Linux. The specific symptom is a network freeze
under heavy I/O load. This is not unknown with the Realtek 8139
Ethernet chipset, but it’s a big hassle when a movie player stops
hard because NFS has suddenly disappeared.

“Copying files off for a system wipe took no less than 3-1/2
days. The happy medium I had to live with was rebooting the file
server every 20 minutes, and limiting rsync to 1.5MB/s. Most of the
time, NFS (a stateless protocol) didn’t have a problem with
resuming transmission after a reboot.”

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