[clue-tech] nfs frustrations

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Wed, 2009-06-03 at 17:22 -0400, Angelo Bertolli wrote:
> 1) There doesn't seem to be any way to get the system to automatically 
> unmount a filesystem that is not responding

I think this depends on how you mount it, but typically the NFS server
needs to respond to the unmount request.  If it aint there, it can't
respond.  I use NFS at home between a bunch of boxes and end up having
to reboot the bad server to get things working again.

> 2) There doesn't seem to be any way to tell NFS to fail within 1 
> minute.  I know the maximum retrans timeout is supposed to be 60 
> seconds, but after tweaking it
> 
> When a mount is unavailable (I'm using ls to test) ...
>     - soft/hard doesn't seem to make any difference (I'm using ro,noexec)
>     - retrans, timeo, retry don't seem to make any difference no matter 

I think you have to use the intr option to be able to unmount if there
is no response, possibly in conjunction with hard?

> what settings I use
>     - I've tried at least 10 combinations of the above, and ls returns 
> with an IO error within 3 - 5 minutes every time.

Intr should allow immediate return, I think.

> Oh well.  We're using nfs3.  Should I expect different behavior from nfs4 ?

Unknown.  I haven't examined the functional differences between the two.
-- 
Michael J. Hammel <mjhammel at graphics-muse.org>