Re: Emacs Hangs on Filesystem Operations on Stale NFS

[Mike Kupfer <mkupfer@alum.berkeley.edu>]

Stefan Monnier wrote:

> - It seems your unreliable NFS server is mounted "hard" rather than "soft".
>   Why is that?  "man mount" on my Debian machine doesn't find any "hard"
>   or "soft" options, so has the soft-mount option disappeared?

Try nfs(5) for a description of "hard" and "soft".  If you don't have
that man page installed, it should be on the web somewhere.

Hard mounts are the default because soft mounts usually cause more
problems than they solve.  

>   What are
>   applications usually expected to do when accessing a stale NFS server?

Could we start by getting a more precise definition of "stale NFS
server"?  I can think of at least 3 different situations that might be
meant:

  - the server is down temporarily
  - the server is down permanently
  - the server is up, but it no longer exports that filesystem

And if the mount is managed by the automounter, the application behavior
will depend on whether the mount has already been established.  (I
think.  I'm very familiar with the Solaris NFS implementation, but not
the Linux implementation.)

mike