how to limit /etc/daily to local only, and cleasring bad nfs mounts

[steve%prd.co.uk@localhost (Steve Blinkhorn)]

1. How to limit /etc/daily,weekly,monthly so they do not cross nfs mount
points?  One of my development systems crashes occasionally when left
running a long job after hours.  It reboots itself, but nfs
connections to it are not restored.  What I don't notice is that
/etc/daily now hangs on a public-facing machine.  Gradually the humber
of processes increases day by day until I have numerous find, tee,
sendmail and sh proceses all stuck.

I can kill some of the /etc/daily related processes, but
not the instances of find.  In the past I have been able to resolve
the problem by remounting the remote filesystems using mount_nfs, or
restarting a crashed rpcbind, but not this time.  BTW, these
processes all have a PPID of 1.

2. Attempts to do anything involving mountd, mount or df results in a
hung process that kill -9 will not remove.  I need to find a way of
restoring normality that is sure-fire, and based on an understanding
of nfs clien-side behaviour.  I can, of course, reboot, but this is a
customer-facing server in a remote data centre, which otherwise is
functioning properly.

This is 9.2 on amd64, but I don't belkieve for a moment that this is
version-related.

-- 
Steve Blinkhorn <steve%prd.co.uk@localhost>