[BBLISA] NFS: How can I see which files are in use?

[Theo Van Dinter]

In short, it's usually very difficult unless your server has a way of
auditing the file operations.  They usually keep track of op counts,
and potentially ops per client, but usually not file paths.

At work, we ended up writing a pcap-based sniffer for NFS which would
watch the traffic and keep track of which files were being accessed.
The main issue, which I don't recall all the details of, was that
requests are largely based on file handles and not paths.  The program
had to watch all the traffic and keep track of path->file handle.  It
was further complicated by bonded NICs, and the large number of
ops/sec that had to be processed, though it worked well enough in the
end.

So the important question is: what NFS server do you use?


On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 1:41 PM, Dewey Sasser <dewey at sasser.com> wrote:
> I would like to be able to see, from my NFS server, which files are in
> use by NFS clients.
>
> My application is a reasonably large VMWare LabManager2/ESX3.5
> installation that's loading my storage server and I can't tell which VM
> is the culprit.  I can get an idea of which *host* is the problem by
> measuring network packets (using tcpdump and some PERL) but beyond that
> I'm kinda stuck.  I'm using NFS for VMWare storage, not iSCSI.