On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 4:10 PM, Paul Heinlein heinlein@madboa.com wrote:
On Wed, 26 Jan 2011, Les Mikesell wrote:
That won't really work. The NFS clients run cPanel and we need a way for end-users to have full access to their backups all the time. We used to run backup over FTP, but then when a client wanted to restore data one of the techs first had to download it from the backup server and then let the client restore it. So I'm trying to cut down on unnecessary support tasks.
I don't see why the automounter wouldn't work for this, but you can mount with the soft,bg options to keep from hanging.
You need to be completely sure that 100% of your apps know how to handle I/O errors before using soft mounts.
Errors in hard-mounted NFS filesystems will produce hanging applications, which are admittedly a pain, but the apps will stop issuing i/o calls until the filesystem returns. An app can never be fooled into think a write or read operation succeeded when it didn't.
Soft-mounted filesystems, however, return error codes that applications can (and most often do) ignore, resulting in all sorts file corruption.
-- Paul Heinlein <> heinlein@madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/ _______________________________________________
the problem I'm getting is that the NFS mount is for backups only, so if it's off-line then no backups can be made, which I can live with for the time being while it's being brought online again.
But, the problem I sit with is that other regular operations on the local disk "hang" so to say, untill I manually unmount the NFS mount. How do I get local operations to continue while the NFS mount if faulty, but not unmounted?