Re: getting Linux into business..

Stig (stig@hackvan.com)
Tue, 20 Aug 96 13:37 PDT


Tyson D. Sawyer wrote:
>
> > c. The ability 'umount -f' a NFS mount to a dead machine.
> [...]
> > >Concerning 5.
> > > a. See above 'Concerning 1d' (50 machines NFS'd every which way)
> > > b. A more robust NFS is needed...
> > The protocol is well-defined you know. Certainly NFS is not optimal, but
> > if you change it it's no longer NFS.
>
> This is one that really seems to be needed. I have (get this...) a
> machine that uses nfs over a phone modem and PPP. When the PPP connection
> goes down for what ever reason, it is impossible to shutdown the NFS
> client machine properly because it is impossible to unmount the nfs
> partion. The result is a hard reset without proper shutdown.
>
> Any ideas other than 'umount -f' to solve this?

More generally, whenever one partition cannot be unmounted, all of the other
partitions should be unmounted anyway. I used to have a problem with an
unreliable disk and/or scsi controller that would force me to fsck every
partition on every disk just because trying to shut down one partition got
stuck. This was the old buslogic driver, not the new one, but I think the
problem is not specific to a single scsi driver.

Stig