small problem with NFS

technomeister · 12-13-2006, 05:03 PM

ok, so i've got an NFS share up and running between two systems in my house.

everything works great, except when the NFS server is powered down for the night. this causes most file operations (file > open) on the client to hang. it's obviously still looking for the NFS share and never times out when it can't find it. I can't umount the share either,even with umount -f - it hangs too...

is there any way around this, apart from manually unmounting the share before the server is powered off?

Brian1 · 12-13-2006, 05:22 PM

What version of NFS are you working with?
Are you mounting with the hard or soft option?
Have you set a timeout value on the mount?
Run the command ' man nfs ' to learn about the above.

Brian

technomeister · 12-13-2006, 06:04 PM

cheers, got it

just needed a little pointer.

It was the soft mount option in fstab i was looking for...

soft: If an NFS file operation has a major timeout then report an I/O error to the calling program. The default is to continue retrying NFS file operations indefinitely.

Using that lets me umount the share, although I see it's not recommended, hence isn't the default. none of the timeout options seem to apply though so it'll have to do.

Brian1 · 12-14-2006, 04:09 PM

Glad you have it worked out.

Brian