[olug] NEED to kill a process....

[Christopher Cashell]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 1:46 PM, Jay Bendon <jaybocc2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> in the future you may want to do a soft mount of the NFS (as opposed to
> what appears to be a hard mount in use right now).  NFS will continue to
> try and try and try to complete its task, this includes waiting for the san
> to come back or whatever. A soft mount will cause it to error out if it
> fails.

You generally don't use NFS (a type of Network Attached Storage (NAS)
with a Storage Area Network (SAN).  With a SAN, you are directly
mounting the storage as a block device using iSCSI, Fiber Channel, or
the like.  The mechanics are somewhat different from NFS and NAS.

As for the soft mount, generally it is recommended pretty strongly
that you avoid soft mounting an NFS share unless you really know what
you're doing.  In bad cases, it can result in data corruption (hard
failure or hang is usually preferable to (possibly silent) data
corruption).  Generally, the recommendation is to do a hard mount and
use the 'intr' option to allow signals to interrupt file operations in
the event of a hang.  For maximum reliability, I would also urge using
NFS v3 or v4, use TCP, and use a modern Linux install with a
relatively recent kernel.

Note: On modern kernels (2.6.25+), the kernel will allow SIGKILL to
interrupt NFS file operations regardless of this setting, and 'intr'
is considered deprecated.

> --Jay

-- 
Christopher