aixterm login hangs when home dir is missing (NFS) - also, hard vs soft mounts
 

Two different but related issues. We have NIS users with home directories on an NFS share. I've got automounting set up in AIX, which works *most* of the time, but every so often if the machine loses network connectivity then the automounts get stuck and don't come back on their own. At this point, anyone trying to login using an aixterm window essentially gets locked out, as their home directories are no longer available.

I'd like to still allow them to login, but have it just give a message and just dump them to a default home directory. With a normal telnet/ssh login it does this - it says hey, I can't mount your home dir, so I'm putting you in /home/guest instead. With the aixterm, though, it just hangs. Any idea how I can get this behaviour in aixterm?

Possibly related - I tried to get the automount to be soft, and to be interruptable. The syntax looks fine, and when I get the output of "mount" those options show, but the behaviour doesn't change. If I try to go to a directory that it can't find, it just hangs, and nothing will interrupt it.

If anyone has anything I could try, I'd be very grateful. :-)

Another thread which I was subscribed to was explored by a user. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to help him/her in their quest but perhaps their experience can help you. The hanging appears to occur due to synchronous connections without caching in NFS (iirc).

At any rate here is their thread and if you find it useful then +1 their post for the work they put in.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...puppet-906084/

Try mounting the file system using the "cio" option. It can help in some cases, hinder in others. SAP use to like it, now it doesn't. Perhaps it would be worth a try and some testing?