[ale] NFS over wireless

[William Witt]

The setup:
I have an old laptop(+ a 500GB hd) acting as an NFS file server and uPnP 
media server for my xbox360 connected via CAT5 and running 
ubuntu-server.  I have two machines (mine and my wifes) plus the xbox 
connected wirelessly.  My wife machine runs linuxMint and mine is 
currently running Fedora 11.

The problem:
When either of us is copying large files (typically 1-2 GB movies) to 
the file server, my wife's desktop and any nautilus windows will freeze 
and sometimes crash.  I know it has to do with the NFS server because 
when this happens "dmesg | tail" yeilds:

[ 2109.988015] nfs: server smeagol not responding, timed out
[ 2111.488016] nfs: server smeagol not responding, timed out
[ 2112.988020] nfs: server smeagol not responding, timed out
[ 2114.488016] nfs: server smeagol not responding, timed out
[ 2115.988014] nfs: server smeagol not responding, timed out
[ 2117.488015] nfs: server smeagol not responding, timed out
[ 2118.988020] nfs: server smeagol not responding, timed out
[ 2120.488016] nfs: server smeagol not responding, timed out
[ 2121.988023] nfs: server smeagol not responding, timed out
[ 2164.731019] nfs: server smeagol not responding, timed out

There is still enough available bandwidth on the wireless connection to 
surf the web and do email.  And on her machine, everything but nautilus 
works fine as long as there are no gnome file dialogs involved.  My 
machine doesn't even hiccup, except for taking a long time to do an ls 
on the nfs mount point.  I did see the same problem on my machine under 
linuxMint and Ubuntu, but not under Suse or Fedora.

The Question:
My wife is opposed to me doing much to her machine that will impact her 
work flow, so putting her on Suse or Fedora is out of the question.  I 
don't own the house or I'd just run cat5 to her box.  Is there a better 
way to tune NFS over wireless networks that will eliminate this problem 
on ubuntu based boxen?  Am I baking up the wrong tree with NFS over 
wireless in the first place?  If so, what should I be using?

On a side note, there seems to be something in our flooring that causes 
A LOT of loos between the second and first floor.  I wonder if there is 
some sort of anti static conductive coating on the laminate flooring 
that the owners put down.

Will