We have been having a nasty problem with I/O errors from AFS. When I posted a note about this a while back, we were able to replicate the problem only with the 'mkisofs' CDROM mastering utility. Now, we have been able to replicate it with 'tar'. Our servers are RS6000 model 530's. The client platform most likely to produce the problem is an RS6000 model 320 with minimal AFS cache. A 'tar' of a mixture of large (~ 100MB) and small files in AFS will fail with an I/O error. I suspect that directing the output of the 'tar' to a file in AFS will make failure more likely. No disk hardware error is found in the system error log. During the 'tar', 'fs getcacheparms' produces the following worrisome output: AFS using 189273 of the cache's available 163840 1K byte blocks. [Cache guideline temporarily deliberately exceeded; it will be adjusted down but you may wish to increase the cache size.] We set our cache size to 80 percent of the size of the dedicated AFS cache partition. Lowering this to 70 percent does not prevent the problem. We are running AIX 3.2.5 and AFS 3.4a-patches. To my knowledge, the problem has been replicated at one other site. I have filed a report with Transarc (TR-23696), but I think it would help if other sites were able to replicate the problem and filed reports. The only reasons I can think of why other sites might not have encountered this problem are that most sites use AFS 'backup' instead of tar, and that the problem may be platform-specific or server-performance-related. Thanks in advance for any help. -Rick -- |Rick Cochran phone: 607-255-7223| |Cornell Materials Science Center FAX: 607-255-3957| |E20 Clark Hall, Ithaca, N.Y. 14853 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]| | "The Founding Fathers did not establish the United States as a | | democratic republic so that elected officials would decide trivia, | | while all great questions would be decided by the judiciary." | | Judge Andrew Kleinfeld |
