Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mcgill-vision!mouse
From: mouse@mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Lots of NFS cross mounts?
Message-ID: <1072@mcgill-vision.UUCP>
Date: 23 Apr 88 07:41:24 GMT
References: <106600042@datacube> <371@ncifcrf.ncifcrf.gov> <23567@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Organization: McGill University, Montreal
Lines: 22

In article <23567@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>, leres@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Craig Leres) writes:
> Another way to lose is to have directories in your path that are on
> nfs filesystems. If the remote system is down, your login csh will
> get hung up waiting for the readdir() to time out while it's hashing
> your path.

In my case, the shell hangs in getwd(), because there's an nfs mount
point as a sibling of one of the directories in the chain getwd follows
from my ~ to /.

This is also true whenever I start something that does a getwd(), like
emacs.  Very annoying.

What NFS needs is per-host rather than per-operation timeouts.  When an
operation times out, all operations to that host fail immediately.  The
client's kernel periodically pings the host with a no-op request and
when it gets an answer, it cancels its dead status.  I'd like to put
this into our VAX kernels, but I don't have time to just now.

					der Mouse

			uucp: mouse@mcgill-vision.uucp
			arpa: mouse@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu