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Date:      Sun, 04 Jan 1998 22:56:25 -0400
From:      =?iso-8859-1?Q?=22Luis_E=2E_Mu=F1oz=22?= <lem@cantv.net>
To:        spork <spork@super-g.com>
Cc:        jbutt@mwci.net, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: [fbsd-isp] Designing for a very large ISP
Message-ID:  <3.0.5.32.19980104225625.007bb280@pop.cantv.net>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980104164317.17626C-100000@super-g.inch.com>
References:  <199801042025.OAA22797@subcellar.mwci.net>

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At 04:50 PM 04/01/1998 -0500, spork wrote:
[snip]
>At this point we see different behaviour.  The client sometimes panics
>(haven't been at the console to see why), or the command hangs and is
>un-killable.  The only way to get rid of the phantom mount seems to be a
>reboot of the client....

A panic is definitely not correct, however a command waiting forever
is normal. These are the semantics of a 'hard' mount on NFS. If you
want the processes to timeout, you need a 'soft' mount. This should
only be done if you really know for sure that you want that. Picture
a mail server trying to deliver mail to a failed NFS mailbox. The
actual timeout might be in the close() call. If this fails, probably
will go undetected and the mail will be lost in the bit bucket.
This is why the default mount stile is 'hard'.

You also cannot unmount a FS while there are operations queued for
the NFS server. You need the server to be back up before you can
unmount. If this doesn't happen, then we have another abnormal
situation...

As a rule of thumb, I assume that the clients will be down of the
NFS server dies for some reason. Sometimes you may think that
the client may continue with other tasks unrelated to the
unresponsive filesystems, but eventually there are going to be
enough blocked processes so as to stop the client.

We've only sporadically used NFS mounts to export CDs and other stuff
in our lab from FreeBSD 2.2.5 servers, with excellent behavior.

>Seems to work well except for this behaviour, but I wouldn't want to put
>it in production.  

Nor do I. I tend to dislike NFS on an ISP core :)

[snip]

-lem




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