Mount options

[SAM_24]

Hi,
When I run bdf and ls command client hangs when NFS server is down. If I use mount(automount) option bg,soft,intr,retry=5 will it help to avoid hang?

Thanks.

[Pete Randall]

Hi,

Yes, in theory the soft option will help. We use to have lots of problems back in the 10.20 days. Now, in well patched 11.0 and 11i systems, automount seems much better behaved. So check your patch level and try your mount options if you continue to experience difficulties.


Pete

[Paul Sperry]

If you mount with the soft option then you will get errors when an NFS server is not available. If you use the hard option, you won't get the errors, but HP-UX will keep trying to get to the NFS mount until the server responds again or you reboot the client.

From the mount_nfs man page:

soft|hard
Return an error if the server does not respond, or continue the retry request until the server responds. The default value is hard.

Hard vs. Soft
File systems that are mounted read-write or that contain executable files should always be mounted with the hard option. Applications using soft mounted file systems may incur unexpected I/O errors.

To improve NFS read performance, files and file attributes are cached. File modification times get updated whenever a write occurs. However, file access times may be temporarily out-of-date until the cache gets refreshed. The attribute cache retains file attributes on the client. Attributes for a file are assigned a time to be flushed. If the file is modified before the flush time, then the flush time is extended by the time since the last modification (under the assumption that files that changed recently are likely to change soon). There is a minimum and maximum flush time extension for regular files and for directories. Setting actimeo=n sets flush time to n seconds for both regular files and directories.

[Sunil Sharma_1]

Hi,
soft option will definetly help you.
please check for latest patches also.
Sunil