On Friday 07 November 2003 22:45 pm, David Krider wrote:
I've been rebooting my main NFS server because I've been adding disk space. This is causing all of my machines to "back up" processes, naturally. I want to just get on with life. I'm going to try "soft,bg,intr,timeo=1" for options in fstab, but I'm looking for other options. Does anyone have a preference for a different filesystem setup? At this point, I'm ready to use samba for all mounting purposes, regardless of the protocol's origins.
I've been using autofs here for the last 18 months with no problems - you can easily distribute the map files with NIS if you like (I don't) and it overcomes all the server-side disconnection problems which can occur with nfs. Out of interest, what do you mean by "adding disk space"? If it's hot-swapped, or just adding new exports then there is no need to reboot, just issue: exportfs -a to re-read the /etc/exports file and have the new exports made available. If you have been adding physical storage which required reboots, then the remote mfs mounts should be unmounted before rebooting the server or the nfs state files in /var/lib/nfs will get out of sync. Autofs would deal with this for you. Autofs also means that unused nfs mounts are automatically unmounted, which means there is less likelyhood of data corruption etc.
I just can't stand that after a dozen years of using Unix and its variants, NFS is the one and only thing that consistently causes me to reboot a box. I've heard of AFS and Coda, but I also hear that they're very difficult to set up. Anyone?
Unless you really need their distributed features and/or robustness and failover then they are probably overkill. HTH Dylan -- Sweet moderation Heart of this nation Desert us not We are between the wars - Billy Bragg