Hi all,

I customarily mount several (W)LAN NFS shares on my laptop running Ubuntu (7.10). I try to remember to manually dismount them when I take the laptop off the LAN, but sometimes I forgot, or the cable falls out, or the wireless connections is momentarily dropped; in such cases, I find it virtually impossible to remount the shares: I try restarting NFS, portmapper, networking, restarting X, anything else I can think of to no avail. Likewise nautilus hangs and the open file dialogs in my apps don't work (probably because I have the NFS mounts bookmarked in nautilus). The only remedy is to reboot.

I seem to recall earlier versions of Ubuntu being more forgiving about lost NFS mounts, but that is perhaps another matter.

In any case:

Is there a way of mounting NFS shares in a more robust way? I usually just run it like mount host:/some/export mountpoint without any options.

Is there some specific way of restarting NFS that I should know of?

Alternately, is there an alternative to NFS which would be better at handling this kind of situation? (My shares are on a Fedora 8 box).

Thanks.

SSHFS is a pretty simple setup, all you need to do is have SSH running on one box & sshfs + fuse on the other. Once your connections been dropped try using umount to unmount the directory. Sometimes I forget to unmount my sda1 thumbdrive before I pull it out and have to manually do:
before it will let me mount it again.

Hope this helps,


Owen.

OK, will give it a try. I found this in the Ubuntu wiki, SSHFS, and it was particulary helpful in setting it up.

Thanks.

My experience with NFS shares is the same as yours. . .when it flakes, it just totally hoses. I've not found a way around it other than restarting the client.

In my experience it happens particularly when either a nautilus window is displaying a share or an app has opened a file on one. There must be some subsystem, like maybe udev, which crashes when this happens.

Here is a partial fix:

Mounting an NFS Volume

Note in particular the section on hard mount vs soft mount. Mounting an nfs share with the soft option may solve some of these problems.