[PLUG] How to umount NFS hung mouts

[Steven A. Adams]

> >   The 'soft' mounting is only acceptable for read-only mounts, and
> >   even then only if you really don't care about your input data
> >   disappearing at random. That's AT RANDOM -- it's not a typo, you'll
> >   get RANDOM failures, depending on how loaded your network and/or
> >   server are at times.
> >
> > --Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>
> 
> Based on the info in the HOWTO, I strongly agree with Paul.  The HOWTO 
> recommends using the "hard" and "intr" options rather than "soft" since 
> "soft" is likely to lead to corruption.

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.

Using a hard mount with intr is a sound answer to this question unless
the server is out of commission for longer than the user will tolerate.
In that event you are left with the same mess when the user hits the
power switch.