NFS Mount Configuration

The NFS and mount protocols allow your machine to access remote networked file systems in the same way that you access local file systems. If you attempt to access a remote file when your SPARCstation Voyager is not connected to a network, however, your machine may appear to stop.

Using the Automounter

To minimize remote access attempts, always use the automounter (automountd). Mounting NFS files exclusively with the automounter insures that remote files are mounted properly and that they are unmounted when not in use (typically five minutes after the last access).

Do not mount file systems with the mount command or by including a mount request in the /etc/vfstab file.

Using the Soft Mount Option

NFS mounts are hard by default, which means that if the file system server fails to respond, the client (i.e. the SPARCstation Voyager) continues to retry the request until it receives a response or until the retry limit (10,000 is the default) is exceeded. If your system is disconnected, then a process that is using a remote file system will appear to stop until the retry limit is reached. You can avoid this problem by declaring that file systems are to be soft mounted. Specify the soft option in the /etc/auto_master file, as follows:

# master map for automounter
#
+auto_master
/net		-hosts			-nosuid,soft
/home		auto_home			-soft

If you experience reliability problems traceable to soft mounts, you can consider not specifying the soft option. However you may become more prone to system stoppages if you accidently access a remote file while disconnected. To minimize this problem, be sure you specify the mount option intr so that you can interrupt mount operations. Refer to the mount_nfs man page for more information about NFS mount options.

Even if you specify soft mounts, when you are disconnected, an NFS mount request may still take a very long time to fail if you have specified replicated mount paths in the automounter configuration file. If the hosts associated with those mount paths are not defined in the /etc/inet/hosts file, even more time elapses. To avoid this problem do not specify replicated mount paths.