Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!agate!agate!rusty From: rusty@belch.Berkeley.EDU (rusty wright) Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin Subject: Re: NFS Mount Point Strategy? Message-ID: Date: 14 Nov 90 22:02:25 GMT References: <1990Nov10.144551.809@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca> <21753@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU> <1990Nov14.203658.23848@cs.utk.edu> Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Followup-To: comp.unix.admin Organization: University of California Berkeley Lines: 29 In-Reply-To: de5@ornl.gov's message of 14 Nov 90 20:36:58 GMT In article <1990Nov14.203658.23848@cs.utk.edu> de5@ornl.gov (Dave Sill) writes: From: de5@ornl.gov (Dave Sill) Subject: Re: NFS Mount Point Strategy? Date: 14 Nov 90 20:36:58 GMT [note: followups redirected to comp.unix.admin] Is there some advantage I'm missing to having everything mounted under /nfs? E.g., why not just /machinename/partition? You'll regret it if you don't have your nfs mounts 3 levels down. The method used by pwd (and by the C library getwd() routine which uses what pwd does to determine the current directory) necessitates walking up the directory tree and doing a stat() on each directory in .. to find out where it came from (save the inode number of . before you move up to .. and then compare that against the inode number of each directory in the new current directory). When it does a stat() on an nfs mounted directory where the nfs server is down you'll hang. csh uses getwd() to initialize the csh variable $cwd so users will hang when logging in if one of the nfs servers is down. Likewise, every time you do cd csh uses getwd() to set $cwd. So each nfs mount has to be mounted on a directory that must be the only directory in its parent; i.e., it must not have any "sisters" or "brothers". I can't remember why they have to be 3 levels down instead of only 2; someone else can probably explain why.