How to Use Client-Side Failover

On the NFS client, mount the file system using the -ro option.

You can do this from the command line, through the automounter, or by adding an entry to /etc/vfstab that looks like:

bee,wasp:/export/share/local  -  /usr/local  nfs  -  no  -o ro

This syntax has been allowed by the automounter in earlier releases, but the failover was not available while file systems were mounted, only when a server was being selected.

Servers that are running different versions of the NFS protocol can not be mixed using a command line or in a vfstab entry. Mixing servers supporting NFS V2 and V3 protocols can only be done with autofs, in which case the best subset of version 2 or version 3 servers is used.