On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 1:26 AM, Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/26/2011 4:55 PM, Dr. Ed Morbius wrote:
The specific solution is 'umount -fl<dir|device>'.
The general solution's a little stickier.
I'd suggest the automount route as well (you're only open to NFS issues while the filesystem is mounted), but you then have to maintain automount maps and run the risk of issues with the automounter (I've seen large production environments in which the OOM killer would arbitrarily select processes to kill ....).
Monitoring of client and server NFS processes helps. If it's the filer heads which are failing, and need warrants it, look into HA failover options.
Soft mounts as mentioned won't hange processes, but may result in data loss. This is most critical in database operations (where atomicity is assumed and generally assured by the DBMS). If the issue is one of re-running a backup job, and you can get a clear failure, risk would be generally mitigated.
Actually, since the original question involved access to backups, I should have given my usual answer which is that backuppc is the thing to use for backups and it provides a web interface for restores (you pick the historical version you want and either tell it to put it back to the original host or you can download a tarball through the browser). Very nice for self-serve access. It does want to map complete hosts to owners that have permission to access them but with a little work you make different areas of a shared system look like separate hosts.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com
BackupPC doesn't intergrate into cPanel.