[PLUG] How to umount NFS hung mouts

[Russ Johnson]

* Mark Martin <mmartin at u.washington.edu> [2003-08-13 16:32]:
> According to the NFS HOWTO, if the offending filesystem was mounted with the 
> "hard" option, intentionally or otherwise, the mount should come back once 
> the NFS server is back up under Linux too.

What it "should" do, and what it actually does are not the same. This
has been the case since kernel 2.2.?? through 2.4.20. My automounted
home directories go away and don't return when the server is Linux. If
the server is Solaris 8.0, it works as you describe. Nothing else
changed. The method of mounting (autofs/NFS), the type of mounting (hard),
or anything else. Literally, all I did was update the automount map in
NIS, and viola!, the server changed, and my stale mount point problem
when away. 

I even tested it during implimentation by rebooting the Solaris server while
files were open on the client. When the server shut down the network,
the client wedged, and as soon as the server came back up, the client
continued on without any issues. 

Conversely, when I had a Linux server, and I'd have to reboot it, the
client would wedge, and never come back, even though the server came
back up. If I could stop the process that was using the NFS mounted
directory, then I could try to manually umount the nfs mount, and
sometimes, that would clear it. Many times, I'd just have to reboot to
get everything back in sync.

I was told at one time that this was because Linux doesn't properly
re-create some ID or socket that's needed to reconnect existing mounts to mount
points, but I'm not a programmer, and I didn't dig into it. 

-- 
Russ Johnson
Dimension 7/Stargate Online
http://www.dimstar.net

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