Hi folks,

At my site all of the the OpenAFS servers are separated from the clients by stateful iptables firewalls that include NAT. The first OpenAFS clients had been running for less than week when I figured that the AFS packets being dropped by the firewall (mostly SPT=7000 DPT=7001) might have something to do with the poor performance being experienced by the users.

Figuring that this would have something to do with UDP timeouts, I found an article somewhere* in which it was suggested that increasing the values for ip_conntrack_udp_timeout and ip_conntrack_udp_timeout_stream from the default 30 of seconds to 28800 (8 hours) would solve things. It seems to have done the trick: AFS packets are no longer being dropped and the users say the system is performing much better.

But I'm worried now that 28800 is probably overdoing it. AFS connections over UDP don't seem to use a lot of random ports, but DNS does and I'm also running Bind9 behind the same firewalls. My worry is that this high timeout value may get me into trouble with things like spoofing and UDP port number recycling (i.e. running out of resources).

What's the best solution in this situation? Is a 28800-second timeout value for UDP connections okay, or can I do with less? Or, would it be an better idea to instead configure all of the workstations with the following command?

   fs checkservers -interval 10

Thanks,

Jaap Winius

*) http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/bdferris/afs_conntrack_nat/index.html
   (okay, this advice may be outdated)
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