[NTLUG:Discuss] A UNIX/Linux Staple: The Automounter -- WAS: Rebuilding (G)libc from an SRPM

[Eric Schnoebelen]

"Bryan J. Smith" writes:
- NFS is stateful by default ("hard" mount).  So the program will wait
- ("hang") until the mount is available.  If no other program is accessing
- the NFS mount, then your system works as normal.

	I've got to take exception to your claims that NFS is
stateful..  It's explicitly designed to be stateless (until
version 4, which isn't in deployment yet..)

	Every NFS request has to care sufficent information for
the server to be able to determine the request being made.  In
fact, as long as the client doesn't make a request, it may never
know if the servers gone down or not...

	A hard mount means that the request will never time out
and fail.. Instead, the client will keep attempting to make
contact with the server until it succeeds or the client is
killed..

- If you want NFS to try to act stateless, like SMB, you can use a "soft"
- mount.  But that typically breaks a lot of UNIX programs.  NFS is very
- different than SMB -- because it is mounted like it is a local
- filesystem -- inodes and all.

	Actually, the presentation of an NFS mounted filesystem is
up to a combination of the cient and the server..  Thus, on a UNIX
system, it looks like /foo/bar/baz, but on a VMS system, it looks
like [foo.bar.baz].  Files are presented to the client as byte
streams at the VFS layer, which generates the file system representation
appropriate to the client system.

	I can't speak to how SMB does things, as it's been a long
time since I looked at it. I think it's more stateful than NFS,
as I remember having to reconnect SMB clients if the SMB server
went down..

--
Eric Schnoebelen		eric at cirr.com		http://www.cirr.com
      "...we have normality"..."Anything you still can't cope with is
	  therefore your own problem..." -- Tricia McMillian, HHGG