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 at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/