Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!morganucodon.cis.ohio-state.edu!paul From: paul@morganucodon.cis.ohio-state.edu (Paul Placeway) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.nfs Subject: Re: hard vs. soft mounts on Suns and Pyramids Message-ID: Date: 15 May 89 21:46:17 GMT References: <15766@bellcore.bellcore.com> <840@mtxinu.UUCP> <2626@elxsi.UUCP> <21283@srcsip.UUCP> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: paul@cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: Ohio State Computer Science Lines: 46 In-reply-to: alarson@pavo.SRC.Honeywell.COM's message of 3 May 89 02:24:55 GMT In article <21283@srcsip.UUCP> alarson@pavo.SRC.Honeywell.COM (Aaron Larson) writes: In article hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) writes: .... - pwd, getcwd, etc., should be coded so that they don't hang unless your current directory is actually on the hung server We get around this by actually mounting the paritions in another directory structure, and link to them. For example our /n dir looks like: /n/foo -> mumble/foo/mp /n/bar -> mumble/bar/mp We mount foo's partitions on top of mumble/foo/mp, and reference them through /n/foo (the actuall structure is not important other than you must be sure that only one machines partitions are mounted in any one directory). This is quite similar to what we do here. For each client, we have a local directory /n, and in it a _local_ directory for each machine, inside of which are the NFS mount points: /n/dinosaur/0/paul ^ ^ | NFS mount point LOCAL directory containing all mount points for dinosaur (the staff server) When pwd comes crawling down, it goes from the nfs mounts into a directory of mount points for just that server (which must be up to get this far), and then into /. We also have the servers mount the disks in the same places so we don't go out of our minds when on a server rather than a client. We generally soft mount everything with timeo=20 and retrans=8. Despite what anyone from Sun may say, we havn't had any problems with soft mounting most everything, (and no, none of us skydive :-) ). I have my own machine hard mount all of it's own server's partitions, since if the server is down my sun hangs anyway (no local disks here). On the other hand, waiting forever and a day for ^C to respond is _real_ annoying. I'm supprised that Sun didn't put in a special check for NFS while they were fattening the kernal with other stuff... -- Paul