Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!ucsd!usc!cs.utexas.edu!rice!sun-spots-request
From: jsulliva@killington.prime.com (Jeff Sullivan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun
Subject: Re: mounted machine down => df hangs
Keywords: Miscellaneous
Message-ID: <2961@brazos.Rice.edu>
Date: 13 Nov 89 15:41:40 GMT
Sender: root@rice.edu
Organization: Sun-Spots
Lines: 19
Approved: Sun-Spots@rice.edu
X-Refs:  Original: v8n180, Replies: v8n188 v8n193
X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 8, Issue 194, message 7 of 23

>When one of our disk servers goes down, doing a 'df' on a machine that has
>the one of the disk server's partitions mounted, causes the 'df' process
>to hang PERMANENTLY.

I think that the reason WHY this occurs has been well covered in recent
responses to this inquiry. However, no one (yet) has offered a fix or
workaround. Since this has happened to me several times in the past, I'll
offer this workaround:

alias df "(echo ' '; /bin/df \!*) &"

That puts df in the background, just in case it doesn't return for a while.

Jeff Sullivan           Computervision Division
CADDS R&D               Prime Computer, Inc.
                        Bedford, MA     01730

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