RedHat 7.3 doesn't play nice using nfs v3, so you have to force it
to use v2.
The symptom is that the computer appears to lock up when reading/writing large numbers of files and/or large files. (Both have been reported, I have only managed to reproduce the large number of files in a kernel source tree unpack). Also the entire network appears to stop. Capturing the network traffic from the offending machine shows an amazing number of UDP/IP fragments.
The solution is to add the option
… in /etc/init.d/autofs.
RedHat claims that this has been addressed in the update kernel packages,
but I'd rather not go there if it isn't absolutely necessary.
links:
Update, 9 September 2004: