Ahh, clears up quit a few things. SO, two more questions :
- Where/how would I "turn on the 'nfs.big_endianize_fileid'" ?
Well, let me first answer that question with another question:
Why do you want to do so?
If you're running a pre-5.0 release, doing so invalidates all file handles that the machine has handed out in the past, so you'll have to remount all clients that have mounted the machine.
If you're running 5.0 or later, it invalidates only file handles handed out before the machine had 5.0 installed on it...
...but, given that it doesn't affect those other file handles, either
1) doing so won't require you to remount, but it also won't do anything interesting (if all machines have remounted since 5.0 or later was put on the machine, or if the machine has run 5.0 or later since Day One)
or
2) doing so will require you to remount at least some machines, and it'll probably be difficult to figure out which ones, except by setting the option and seeing what machines get stale file handles (if some machines mounted before 5.0 or later was put on the machine, and hadn't remounted since 5.0 or later was put on the machine).
All it buys you is
1) better performance with *some* client OSes (some versions of IRIX and HP-UX, I think, get better performance; I don't know which versions)
and
2) big-endian file IDs, so that if you decide you can actually get an interesting answer from the procedure I described, the effort involved is *slightly* reduced.
Now, if you still want to do that, "nfs.big_endianize_fileid" is a standard (documented) option, so you'd just:
unmount the clients that will need to remount;
put "options nfs.big_endianize_fileid" in "/etc/rc" (which you might have to do before the remount, if *all* clients need to remount);
type "options nfs.big_endianize_fileid" on the console (ah, the joys of the UNIX tradition of "change the rc file, and then re-type the command on the console", which we, alas, follow);
remount the clients in question.
- Is there a way of converting the numbers without having to do it by
hand?
None that I know of, other than writing a program to do it.