I have two machines. We'll call them Master and Slave. Master serves NFS mount to the Slave, if the master goes down, it's all fine and dandy, when it comes back up, the mounted fs will again be accessible. One caveat; if the slave is rebooted, and the master is down/rebooting and the slave comes up attempting to mount the nfs share without the master being able to abide, it will never mount the nfs share without manual interaction (mount -a et al) Is there some set of fstab options that will force it to retry to initial mount (not just subsequent retries/remounts on fs timeout)


robf

About retrying, have a look at "man nfs". The option "retry=n" for NFS4 with fore/background mounts.
Hope this helps

Done and done, to avail. This isn't the problem I don't think... Here is what I see occurring although I can't be for certain, but this is what it appears to be doing. When the system (client) boots, it mounts the devices/locations from fstab, including the NFS share on the master. Problem is that if it doesn't mount, then it fails, there is no retry because mount failed, and the retry=n is never actually of consequence. It seems that once it's been mounted retry correctly works. I've tried all options both hard/soft and fg/bg, to no avail. I'm not really sure what I can do to offset this. Currently we have a script that causes it to just wait to mount nfs, (since it typically doesn't take more than about 20-30 seconds for the master to come up after the slave has booted, this is usually sufficient) But I see this a fail point if for some reason the master was not to come up in the allotted time, thus this really needs to be handled via the correct methods, of which I'm lost to.

Having pondered your client mount issue can't find a 'correct method' either. My reading man ifplugd suggests it might present a painless work around. There is a run= option that is executed on change of nic status. So you sit at the client and can't login to your server home. Unplug the nic and then wait till you think the master/server is up then replug. Not sure you would need/want an unmount -t nfs when the nic goes inactive but would want to mount -t nfs when the nic goes active.

I present as concept only and have no practical experience.

ppd