[PLUG] How to umount NFS hung mouts

Felix Lee felix.1 at canids.net
Wed Aug 13 16:55:03 UTC 2003


"Steven A. Adams" <stevea at nwtechops.com>:
> Not to be to defensive of the technology too much here, and no
> disrespect to Mark and Paul intended, but I've personally used soft nfs
> mounts for a number of years in Solaris and Linux environments and have
> had no problems at all. Of course, in all cases we planned network and
> server capacity to realistically accommodate the active client load. It
> seems to me that this argument against soft mounts is hinges on factors
> external to nfs being inadequate for normal operation - which, in
> itself, is a major cause of data corruption.

If your network is as well-designed as you say, then mounting
hard instead of soft should not cause any problems, therefore you
should mount hard so that programs don't silently fail.

Programs silently fail because NFS changes some of the basic
assumptions about Unix file I/O, and most programmers don't spend
much time writing code that checks for conditions they think are
impossible.

Well, NFS has been around for a couple years now, maybe
everyone's learned new programming habits and fixed all the old
programs already.  Someone should check.
--




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