On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 02:38:43PM -0500, Steven M. Wilson wrote:
> Jeremy,
> 
> That could very well be the problem I'm having since I just tried a df 
> on the client system and it ground to a halt trying to located NFS 
> mounts.  We rely heavily on NFS here so I'll need to figure out how to 
> get around this problem in the future.  Thanks for the info.
> 
> Steve
> 
> Jeremy L. Mordkoff wrote:
> 
> >no, the list was no help. The problem was that the client had nfs-mounted 
> >a disk that was no longer on the net, so anything that iterated over 
> >mounts (like df) was hanging. That is probably why reboot solve it. I 
> >don't allow key machines to be nfs clients anymore.


I'm not on solid ground here, but ISTR that nfs mounts can be done in
two ways "hard" and "soft".  In one, the assumption is that the remote
will never be down and will eventually respond.  Or that for some reason
the software accessing the remote files can't deal with an error and
should never receive one.

Thus, for that style of nfs mount (forget whether it is hard or soft),
when the remote file systems are not available the caller is blocked and
is never returned to with an error.

On the other style of nfs mount, there is a timeout period and if the remote
server doesn't respond is that period, the caller is returned to with an error.

 
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)