On Monday 03 January 2005 17:47, James Knott wrote:
Jonathan Brooks wrote:
Well said - in my bad old solaris 2.6 days we used automounter maps to get round the problem of a "downed" NFS server hanging the solaris clients. There's autofs for Linux, but I'm not sure how robust it is - any feedback anyone?
Of course, there is the argument that when you have all your files on a central NFS server, if it hangs you couldn't possibly do anything useful with the clients anyway, but I think that's a cop-out. You'd like the NFS server to re-establish connections to the clients once it's back up, but I guess that's in the realms of kernel software development and other scary stuff and the like ;)
As I recall, a soft mount is supposed to resolve that problem. Then again, we're not talking Windows servers here, so there'd not likely be many server failures. ;-)
But, since I started all this just wanting to share directories between two Linux boxes (both SuSE 9.2 Pro), and since the directories that need sharing are on both systems (some on each), I got the idea that whatever filesystem service I used, I'd have to have a server running on each PC, in order to serve shares to the Client on the other, respectively. If I'm wrong on that, somebody oughta tell me that just one server on the network can reach out and share a directory that lives on another machine... that's not how I imagined it to work, but... Anyway, my Linux box is my only PC at home, so it's on most of the time. My wife's PC is dual boot (because I'm still waiting for that other fellow to tell me where to get tax software that runs on Linux, so she can drop Windows... :-) This means that her Linux machine absolutely *will* go down while my machine is connected (whether by NFS, SAMBA or whatever), probably several times per week. If that meant a hang of my PC every time -- and a hang of hers everytime mine was hung.... looks like an endless loop to me. That's less convenient than sneakernet or e-mail. I've only heard from half a dozen people on this thread, and among them they disagree about whether NFS takes the computer to lunch when another NFS server goes away. Surely out of the hundreds or thousands of members of this list, there must be more than a few who have two Linux boxes sharing files/directories across a simple home network. What are all the rest of you doing? Kevin (still unshared)