We are currently using NFS over TCP for news purposes. Is that a bad thing?
Not necessarly. Do you have a reason for needed tcp such as your are doing long haul networking?
However there are a lot of things that can go wrong with tcp that can't with udp (there are lots of very broken tcp implementations in this world: not ours of course:-) I would sugest disabling tcp and see what happens. If things stay the same or get better just leave it that way. If not you had tcp turned on for a reason.
We currently run with NFS v2/UDP on our NetApp. The change from v3 to v2 resulted in a noticeable decrease in expiry time for us.
The disadvantage of NFS v2 is that you won't be able to get number of inodes (files) via NFS. I like the suggestion from Guy Harris to deal with this: Use two mount points for the NetApp file system - one NFSv2 for the main News spool, and one NFSv3 to be able to check inodes, selected by suitable mount options on client.
Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no