NFS problem

[Mark T. Valites]

On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, S. Johnson wrote:

> Hi Bob,
>
> Good to hear from you!
> At 09:39 10/02/03 -0700, you wrote:
> >Well, first thing that I would do is change the mount options to add the
> >'soft'
> >option:
> >server3:/users /users nfs bg,soft,nfsvers=3,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 0
>
> Referencing the sourceforge site, it says that soft mounting is a BAD thing if
> you value your mail.  Here's a quote from the site:

I actually can't live without the soft option. If for some terribly awfull
reason my nfs server isn't reachable, my nfs clients will all drive their
load through the roof and hang themselves so bad I can't get back into
them. Not that this happens often, but it's one less thing to worry about
when things are *really* bad...

>   If a file request fails, the NFS client will report an error to the
> process on the client machine requesting the file access. Some programs can
> handle this with composure, most won't. We do not recommend using this
> setting; it is a recipe for corrupted files and lost data. You should
> especially not use this for mail disks --- if you value your mail, that is.

> How will courier-imap and Postfix handle things if a request times out?  I
> would still take Bob's recommendation over that of a single reference on
> sourceforge.  I will do some testing using a soft mount and a hard mount
> with the intr option as well.

With this setup, mbox is no longer in use & every message is a single
file. The likely hood of munging a single tiny maildir file is
significantly less than the odds of eating a mbox file.

But you're probably right - now that I think about it,I didn't cut over to
soft until I moved from mbox to maildir.

-- 
Mark T. Valites
Unix Systems Analyst
CIT - SUNY Geneseo
>--))> >--))>