Breaking out of hanging df -h when NFS shares are unreachable.

keysorsoze · 10-19-2008, 02:07 PM

Hi! We have had several instances where we would issue a "df -h" to see if our NFS shares are mounted where we experience hangs when they are not avalible. I have tried the classic ctrl+c using the bash shell with no luck can someone offer a better solution? The entire terminal seems to just hang and we cannot break out of it.

Thanks

irishbitte · 10-19-2008, 09:14 PM

Check your mount commands in /etc/fstab. If you have soft mount, it will wait until it receives a response.

jlliagre · 10-20-2008, 01:24 AM

You can try Control-Z instead of Control-C or just run the df command in background to avoid the issue.

irishbitte · 10-20-2008, 08:29 AM

The console session will hang until it sees something, do

Code:

man df

and see do you turn up anything interesting? An interesting option is -l:

Code:

df -l

This will return only locally mounted disks, and will ignore NFS systems.

BTW, any idea why your NFS disk is not responding to df?

keysorsoze · 10-20-2008, 07:10 PM

Thank you for your replies irishbitte and jlliagre. I normally run "df -h" but on accident sometimes run a "df -h" which returns all mounted disks. The reason they are not mounted is because we have a netapp filer that gets powered on last on some instances. Thus the solaris boxes freak out when they can't mount the mount points. I will add soft nfs mount points and try the Ctrl+Z next time they lock up to see if it helps.

irishbitte · 10-21-2008, 09:29 AM

My suggestion is that you change your process, and try to ssh into your netapp box first to make sure it is up before using df? This way, you can always check if the box is available before invoking df. Bit of a kludge, but it will stop your machine hanging....

ADxD_7 · 10-23-2008, 04:39 PM

Another couple cool commands I like are dfshares and dfmounts - man them and check them out -