[SOLVED] NFS mount in fstab: howto retry if server is down

brickZA · 10-06-2011, 03:33 AM

When cold starting an sever and its clients, it seems that the clients don't retry the mount if the server is still down (or the nfs server process has not started yet) when they boot. In the client fstab I have:

server:/var/kat/katstore /mnt/katstore nfs size=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14,intr,bg

I added the 'bg' option in the hope that it would continue re-trying after the initial mount failed, but it never seems to get mounted.

If the server is ready before the client boots, the client does the mount with no problems.

Both the server and the client are running Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS

How can I get the client to continue re-trying the mount until the server is ready?

Thanks
Neilen

corp769 · 10-06-2011, 03:43 AM

Hello,

Read here - http://swoolley.org/man.cgi/5/nfs
Specifically:

Code:

retry=n        The number of minutes to retry an NFS mount operation in
               the foreground or  background  before  giving  up.   The
               default  value  is  10000  minutes, which is roughly one
               week.

Cheers,

Josh

brickZA · 10-06-2011, 03:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by corp769

Hello,

Read here - http://swoolley.org/man.cgi/5/nfs
Specifically:

Code:

retry=n        The number of minutes to retry an NFS mount operation in
               the foreground or  background  before  giving  up.   The
               default  value  is  10000  minutes, which is roughly one
               week.

Cheers,

Josh

Yeah, I saw that before, but the default of 10000 minutes seems super reasonable. We're talking a question of minutes here. Just to double-check that the ubuntu configuration did not use some other default I added retry=1000 to the options. It made no difference though.

brickZA · 10-14-2011, 08:08 AM

Well, it seems, as far as I can tell, that just about every linux distribution out there is fundamentally broken w.r.t. handling boot time nfs mounts ;-)

In any case, a work around is presented in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...l/+bug/836533/ . I skipped the upstart bit, and just made my /etc/rc.local call the ensure-nfs-mounted script attached to that issue.

corp769 · 10-14-2011, 08:18 AM

Oh ok, that works then. And sorry, I didn't see the notification for your thread. I am subscribed to a LOT of threads on these forums.... But anyways, glad to see you got it working. Mark your thread as solved if you can, thanks!

Cheers,

Josh

grim76 · 10-14-2011, 12:08 PM

Look into the _netdev mount option if you are having problems with NFS mounts at boot time.