NFS mount parameters

I'm trying to figure out a good set of NFS mount parameters, and even after looking at the NFS and mount man pages, I still don't know what to use. I've observed that during bootup it takes quite a while for NFS mounts of an offline machine to fail and give up, using the defaults; I'd like to make that process much faster. I also want to ensure that a failed mount is retried every minute or so. Any suggestions? Paul Abrahams