NFS mount behaviour

[Andreas D. Skjervold]

Hi
How does mount behave during boot (/sbin/init.d/nfs.client), when trying to mount a NFS filesystem from a remote server currently offline (also booting).
Will the the boot process stop, waiting for the remote server to be accessible or
will the server boot, while the rpc continues trying to mount the remote filesystem , and is it some timeout in this attempts.

Andreas

[Dan Hetzel · Accepted solution]

Hi Andreas,

It all depends on the mount flags you have in /etc/fstab:

bg|fg If the first attempt fails, retry in the background, or, in the foreground. The default is fg.

retry=n The number of times to retry the mount operation. The default is 1.

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.


Best regards,

Dan

[Andreas D. Skjervold]

Thanks for clearing things up;
Here is my fstab entry:
ccb4tdb1:/ccb4tdb1/home/bench/updater /home/bench/updater nfs rw,hard 0 0

and as I have been able to figure out:
This is mounted in the foreground using hard, which means that it will retry indefinatly, regardless of the retry setting (1), so if the remote filesystem is unavailable during system startup, the boot process will wait until the remote server is available.

Have I got it right?

Andreas

[Dan Hetzel]

Hi,

You're right ! You should use the 'soft' flag as this will allow the boot process to continue if server is not available.

Dan