UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have a situation where there are two SCO R5 Open Server Unix boxes in a remote location. The two boxes are inter-related via NFS mounts. My problem occurs when one of the boxes goes down, the NFS relationship stops the remaining machine from carrying on, even though it would be able to do so if in stand alone mode. Therfore is it possible to add something to "disentangle" each machine from the other in the event of a shutdown ?

I know that on Solaris NFS has some issues...you can set the setting in /etc/vfstab (I think)...by default it will try to connect 10000 times if a server is not available and as such floods the TCP connections and the machine can hardly do anything...I am not sure the exact settings but I think there is a flag YES/NO where you can set it to NO so that it doesn't look for the machine and carries on...This is true for solaris...no idea about any SCO...but I am sure there must be a setting some where in the /etc dir...look for nfs files.../etc/dfs/dfstab, etc etc...hope this helps...

Hi,

In nfs for Linux you can adjust the retry mount operation by altering the retry option in /etc/fstab, this defaults to 10000 minutes.

You could alter this to retry=1

Also have you tried using the "soft" option to soft mount the directory shares.

Another option you may want to try is "intr" this allows file operations to be interrupted.


Hope this helps


Andy Hibbins