Just how reliable is NFS?

[Paul Eggert]

In article <2428 at phri.UUCP> roy at phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes:

|NFS uses UDP as the underlying transport protocol but to improve
|performance, Sun has turned off checksumming in NFS/UDP packets.
|...	Has anybody done any studies to determine if this causes any problems?

No studies, but I have an anecdote.  Last week we had an Intel Ethernet
controller board go slightly bad on a Sun-2/120 running 3.0.  TCP/IP worked
fine, but NFS had rare bit errors without issuing any diagnostic messages.
The bit errors were in executable files, causing core dumps that were oddly
reproducible due to caching.  I wasted some time tracking this down.  Had NFS
checksummed, the problem would had been evident.

-- Paul Eggert, SDC Santa Monica