Re: NFS

[Jukka Marin <jmarin%embedtronics.fi@localhost>]

On Wed, Jun 03, 2009 at 12:11:10PM +0100, Matthias Scheler wrote:
> > Yep, that's why I'm using -X.
> 
> That option never caused a problem for me.
> 
> My NetBSD NFS servers works very well for me, definitely much better
> than the Linux NFS server at work.

I don't think there's a problem with the server.  I think it's the client
that is having problems.  In fact, no matter what happens to the server
or the network cable, the switches or whatever, the NFS client should
never become unusable.  (Well, as long as /, /usr, /var and other
essential things are on a local disk.)

Sure, if the network dies, you will no longer be able to access the remote
disks, but you should still be able to kill off the processes trying to
do so.  You should still be able to unmount the remote disk (you may lose
some unwritten data, sure).  And you should still be able to shutdown and
reboot the client system.

At the moment, if NFS dies (for whatever the reason), the client is
pretty much useless, all processes even thinking of touching the NFS
disk are dead, a graceful reboot is impossible, etc.

I was using UDP with NFS because I thought it would get over a server
reboot better than TCP.  I'm not sure about this (my server has been
quite reliable so far).  I have had problems with clients when server
goes down, but this was years ago.

  -jm