NFS HOWTO : Setting up a NFS client : Mount options
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4.1. Mount options

There are some options you should consider adding at once. They govern the way the NFS client handles a server crash or network outage. One of the cool things about NFS is that it can handle this gracefully. If you set up the clients right. There are two distinct failure modes:

soft

The NFS client will report an error to the process accessing a file on a NFS mounted file system. Some programs can handle this with composure, most won't. I cannot recommend using this setting, it is a recepie for corrupted files and lost data. You should especially not use this for mail disks --- if you value your mail that is.

hard

The program accessing a file on a NFS mounted file system will hang when the server crashes. The process cannot be interrupted or killed unless you also specify intr. When the NFS server is back online the program will continue undisturbed from where it were. This is probably what you want. I recommend using hard,intr on all NFS mounted file systems.

Picking up the previous example, this is now your fstab entry:


# Device      Mountpoint     FStype      Options	      Dump Pass#    
...
eris:/mn/eris/local  /mnt    nfs	rsize=1024,wsize=1024,hard,intr 0 0
...


NFS HOWTO : Setting up a NFS client : Mount options
Previous: Setting up a NFS client
Next: Optimizing NFS