Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!smoke.cs.toronto.edu!neat.cs.toronto.edu!moraes
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
From: moraes@cs.toronto.edu (Mark Moraes)
Subject: Re: Force dismount NFS partitions?
Message-ID: <90Oct16.234936edt.1354@smoke.cs.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
References: <870@ki.UUCP> <1990Oct17.003935.15103@nstn.ns.ca>
Date: 17 Oct 90 03:49:50 GMT
Lines: 15

marinell@Iris1.UCIS.Dal.Ca (Kevin Marinelli) writes:
>    If you set up the NFS mounted partitions to be "soft" mounted,
>the system will not hang when host server goes away.
>everything will continue to work, although  any access to the partition via
>df will report that it cannot be accessed. Otherwise, the partition will look
>like an empty subdirectory when it is not mounted.

Since reads and writes on soft-mounted partitions can fail if the
server is loaded or confused, this can cause programs that don't check
system call return values to blithely keep going, creating trashed
files.  There's a large number of such programs.  Mounting rw
partitions soft is not a good idea if you value files in those
partitions.

	Mark.