Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!bellcore!dduck!tr
From: tr@dduck.ctt.bellcore.com (tom reingold)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.nfs
Subject: hard vs. soft mounts on Suns and Pyramids
Message-ID: <15766@bellcore.bellcore.com>
Date: 28 Apr 89 15:01:01 GMT
Sender: news@bellcore.bellcore.com
Reply-To: tr@dduck.UUCP (tom reingold)
Organization: Bellcore, Piscataway, Noo Joizy
Lines: 21

It says in the SunOS 4.x manual page for mount(8) that a soft mount
"returns an error if the server does not respond" and that a hard mount
"continues the retry request until the server responds".  In my
experience, the choice is worse than it appears:  Soft mounts do not
always return errors on writes; they can just garble the output without
warnings.  And hard mounts are not interruptible, even with the "intr"
option.

Further, it says that "filesystems that are mounted `rw' (read-write)
should use the `hard' option.  The problem with this is that the entire
client and all of its processes can hang when one process is trying to
write on a hard-mounted filesystem when the server is down!  This is a
terrible situation when the client is a large time-sharing system.

What are my real choices, and how do they differ from the manual.  What
else can I read on this?

Tom Reingold                   |INTERNET:       tr@ctt.bellcore.com
Bell Communications Research   |UUCP:           bellcore!ctt!tr
444 Hoes La room 1E225         |PHONE:          (201) 699-7058 [work],
Piscataway, NJ 08854           |                (201) 287-2345 [home]