[DRBD-user] Migrating NFS to a DRBD block device

[Omar Kilani]

Hello, World,

I'm in the process of moving my RHEL3 based NFS server onto DRBD.
Setup and configuration is fine, replication works, etc.

Unfortunately, if I stop the NFS service, remount the block device on 
which NFS exports from onto DRBD, and start up again, my NFS clients 
start receiving 'stale file handle' errors. AFAICS, this should work, 
since NFS has no inherent tie to the lower level device -- it sits on 
top of the file system, after all.

Stopping NFS, unmounting from the DRBD block dev, remounting the lower 
level device and starting NFS again gets things working on the client 
side. So I was wondering what the problem could be?

I'm using an *external* meta data device.

Oh, one last question. I've got:

    wfc-timeout  60;
    degr-wfc-timeout 120;    # 2 minutes.

yet, when the drbd initscript runs, it just waits forever (although the 
message does say "the timeout for resource X is 60 seconds"). I'm 
obviously missing something... I haven't used drbd in production since 
2001 (version 0.5.8 is still running well... :) so I'm probably not up 
with the latest configuration syntax. :)

Oh, I'm running version 0.7.5.

Thanks.

Regards,
Omar Kilani