NFS hangs on graphical login

I've got a problem that has not yielded to my normal process of
Googling for hours, reading man pages, and asking the guys at work.

I recently installed RedHat 9 on my Toshiba laptop which uses a
Netgear FA411 PCMCIA ethernet card.

The installation went perfectly, and networking came up with no
problems at all.

Local accounts can log in graphically using Gnome, KDE, or Icewm (added
to the GDM menu myself). No problem.

When I have it connected to my home LAN, and start up NIS and autofs,
like the rest of mu home machines, there is a problem. Accounts with
their home directories on the file server work fine when I log into
them from a virtual console. No problem at all. I can also ssh into
them from another machine on the network and work with them for a long
time.

But as soon as I try to log into one of these network-homed accounts
graphically from the GDM login menu, the login freezes.

When I switch back to the VC, any sessions open for this user are
frozen as well. The /var/log/messages file says "NFS server hobbes not
responding". There are no error messages in the /var/log/messages file
on hobbes.

Oddly enough, *another* network-homed user with their home on the same
user can still log in on a VC with no problem.

At this point, nothing I've tried can salvage the login sessions or
mount points. kill, fuser -k, gdm-restart, nothing. It's reboot
time. Sometime the reboot hangs and I have to resort to the power
switch.

As I mentioned, I've Googled this quite a bit, and the closest things
I've found are suggestions to pass the "nolock", "nfsvers=2", and
"rsize=1024,wsize=1024" as local options to the automounter. These were
actually suggestions for NFS freezing under other circumstances.

I was already using "nolock", and "nfsvers=2" did
nothing. "rsize=1024,wsize=1024" actually sometimes delays the lockup
a little while, but does not stop it. I tried 512, but no better. I
suspect these low numbers will yield poor NFS performance in any case.

Sorry the post went on so long, but I wanted to be thorough...

Anyone have any suggestions?

--
Jim Buchanan (E-Mail Removed)
=================== http://www.buchanan1.net/ ==========================
"And the band played on, while the helicopters whirred,
Drunk on the lawn in a nuclear dawn, my senses finely blurred"
-Moxy Fruvous
================= Visit: http://www.thehungersite.com ==================

In comp.os.linux.redhat (E-Mail Removed) wrote:
> I recently installed RedHat 9 on my Toshiba laptop which uses a
> Netgear FA411 PCMCIA ethernet card.
[...]
> Local accounts can log in graphically using Gnome, KDE, or Icewm (added
> to the GDM menu myself). No problem.
[...]
> But as soon as I try to log into one of these network-homed accounts
> graphically from the GDM login menu, the login freezes.

Problem solved!

I tried two other ideas that did not work.

Despite my memory saying that there were no appropriate errata at
RedHat's site, I got all the RH9 errata, and installed all the rpm's
on both the server and the laptop. No help.

I went to Netgear's website to see if there was a newer driver for the
FA411 card. There was a driver, but it was older, for the 2.2 kernel.

Yesterday (the 19th), I went out and got a Linksys pcmcia ethernet
card to replace the Netgear.

I swapped them, and powered it up. kudzu did not notice the
difference, but the pcmcia software did, it was recognized and
configured, the machine came up with a running Linksys card.

All my networking problems are gone.

--
Jim Buchanan (E-Mail Removed)
=================== http://www.buchanan1.net/ ==========================
"A programmer's curriculum was complex, one in a million might fit. A typical
world might need twenty programmers." -Isaac Asimov, _Profession_
================= Visit: http://www.thehungersite.com ==================