Re: NFS hang + umount -f: better behaviour requested.

From: Ric Wheeler
Date: Fri Aug 24 2007 - 12:16:17 EST


J. Bruce Fields wrote:
On Tue, Aug 21, 2007 at 02:50:42PM -0400, John Stoffel wrote:
Not in my experience. We use NetApps as our backing NFS servers, so
maybe my experience isn't totally relevant. But with a mix of Linux
and Solaris clients, we've never had problems with soft,intr on our
NFS clients.

We also don't see file corruption, mysterious executables failing to
run, etc.

Now maybe those issues are raised when you have a Linux NFS server
with Solaris clients. But in my book, reliable NFS servers are key,
and if they are reliable, 'soft,intr' works just fine.

The NFS server alone can't prevent the problems Peter Staubach refers
to. Their frequency also depends on the network and the way you're
using the filesystem. (A sufficiently paranoid application accessing
the filesystem could function correctly despite the problems caused by
soft mounts, but the degree of paranoia required probably isn't common.)
Would it be sufficient to insure that that application always issues an fsync() before closing any recently written/updated file? Is there some other subtle paranoid techniques that should be used?

ric

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