Free me from the pain of NFS!

On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 11:03:26AM -0800, Tyler MacDonald wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> I currently have several NFS mounts to share my media between my
> PVR, my workstation, and my neighbour's workstation downstairs.
>
> The problem is, a lot of the time the mounts are not loaded on boot
> for some reason or another (eg; in the case of a power outage, all computers
> come back up at the same time, but they don't all take the same amount of
> time to boot... so one will try to mount the NFS shares before the other is
> serving them, etc.)
>
> Also, sometimes after one system reboots, the other system starts
> complaining about "stale NFS filehandle"s and does not re-mount the
> partition.
>
> What I really want, is to be able to define shares in /etc/fstab,
> and have the system keep trying to re-mount them if they ever become
> unavailable... Is there any way to improve the reliability/availability of
> NFS mounts? Or is there something else I should be using?

maybe autofs would help? they won't mount until you try to use them

A

Tyler MacDonald wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> I currently have several NFS mounts to share my media between my
> PVR, my workstation, and my neighbour's workstation downstairs.
>
> The problem is, a lot of the time the mounts are not loaded on boot
> for some reason or another (eg; in the case of a power outage, all computers
> come back up at the same time, but they don't all take the same amount of
> time to boot... so one will try to mount the NFS shares before the other is
> serving them, etc.)
>
> Also, sometimes after one system reboots, the other system starts
> complaining about "stale NFS filehandle"s and does not re-mount the
> partition.
>
> What I really want, is to be able to define shares in /etc/fstab,
> and have the system keep trying to re-mount them if they ever become
> unavailable... Is there any way to improve the reliability/availability of
> NFS mounts? Or is there something else I should be using?
>
> Thanks,
> Tyler
>
>
>
Autofs. We've been using it here for years to cross-mount user home
areas automatically. Works like a charm.[1]

Michael

[1] That's not entirely true, I do seem to have some nagging problems
with updates to our NIS-served /etc/auto.home file not being noticed by
autofs sometimes, but that's not a problem you would ever encounter.

--

On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 11:03:26AM -0800, Tyler MacDonald wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> I currently have several NFS mounts to share my media between my
> PVR, my workstation, and my neighbour's workstation downstairs.
>
> The problem is, a lot of the time the mounts are not loaded on boot
> for some reason or another (eg; in the case of a power outage, all computers
> come back up at the same time, but they don't all take the same amount of
> time to boot... so one will try to mount the NFS shares before the other is
> serving them, etc.)
>
Something like AFS might help solve that problem. However, it is
complex, requires a working Kerberos setup on your network and can be
more difficult to administer. So, unless you are ready to handle all
that, I'd go with the autofs suggestions offered by others.

Regards,

-Roberto

--
Roberto C. Sanchez
http://people.connexer.com/~roberto
http://www.connexer.com

Tyler MacDonald wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> I currently have several NFS mounts to share my media between my
> PVR, my workstation, and my neighbour's workstation downstairs.
>
> The problem is, a lot of the time the mounts are not loaded on boot
> for some reason or another (eg; in the case of a power outage, all computers
> come back up at the same time, but they don't all take the same amount of
> time to boot... so one will try to mount the NFS shares before the other is
> serving them, etc.)
>
> Also, sometimes after one system reboots, the other system starts
> complaining about "stale NFS filehandle"s and does not re-mount the
> partition.
>
> What I really want, is to be able to define shares in /etc/fstab,
> and have the system keep trying to re-mount them if they ever become
> unavailable... Is there any way to improve the reliability/availability of
> NFS mounts? Or is there something else I should be using?
>
> Thanks,
> Tyler
>
>

Have you experimented with the hard, soft, intr and timeo options? See the nfs
and mount man pages for details.

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