and you posted it 3 times....

Actually only twice - the first time it was in two parts. The second time it was combined into one.

Does anyone see anything that might help me out here? I'm pretty desperate.

please don't "bump" up your post. it's against the rules of unix.com!

OK, I tried increasing the time out using timeo and raised it to 5 seconds (timeo=50). It looked like it worked at first, I was able to list and all, but then after a reboot (I put the timeout into /etc/fstab) it was back to its old tricks.

I also noticed a couple (2 each of 2) ethernet cards sharing IRQs (9 & 10) - though this machine supports IRQ sharing, I thought I'd remove them in case. No change, so I put them back into the machine.

Look like timeo worked after all. I brought it up to 250 (25 seconds) and it is responding. Now all I have to do is to get the response time down. I suspect it is the 10/100 ethernet card and the Cisco 2900 switch it is going into. Probably some incompatibility between the two. I'll try synching them at 100 full duplex and see what happpens.

Thanks All!

Final Report:

Origin: Hub fried, moved ethernet from hub to switch. Both are 10/100 autonegotiating

Symptom: I can mount nfs file system to any mount point on the machine EXCEPT the mount point it needs to be on and see the file system as it should be. When I mount to that correct mount point, the machine hangs when I try to list files or perform any other action within that file system.

Initial response: I looked into many red herrings, but the one that brought success was increasing timeo to 250. When I did that, I could perform any tasks I needed to in that file system.

Probable Cause: My suspicion is that the 10/100 autonegotiation did not occur correctly, slowing down nfs communication between the file server and client. When I mounted on a mount point that did not connect to the service it needed to connect to, the load was light and I was able to do most things with it. When on the proper mount point, the load was sufficient to overload the ethernet connection and cause nfs timeouts.

Corrective Action: Disable autonegotiation and set both sides to 100 duplex.

Mike