UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello World,

We have a software repository server in our environment which we use as an NFS server.
Now this has been going on well before I was hired. Now, I observed many users not unmounting the NFS resources after their use. I ran showmount and it showed 513 current sessions.
Is there a way I could know the idle clients (i.e., which haven't been using the mounted NFS resources)?

I thought of a solution - I would automate a script in which I be unmounting all the NFS directories using ssh. So, if the client is still using, the unmount would automatically be declined.

The problem here is I need to enter the password (and even type 'yes' to save RSA key fingerprint) for each of the 513 attempts. Is there a way to automate this? I had tried 'sshpass' but it completely fails.

Could someone help me complete my script? Or this there a better way to automate remote unmounting (no nfs restart/reload please)?

What problem are you trying to solve. You could do

Code:

netstat  -an | grep 2049

This shows clients connected to port 2049, NFS port on my system.

I thought I explained my situation clearly. Is there a way I could disconnect all idle clients from my NFS server?

Some systems allow some mounts to be done automatically when needed and to automatically unmount them if they haven't been used for a specified time limit. Check the -t duration option on the Solaris automount(1M) man page.

This is a Linux machine, to be clear. But I guess autmount still has the same function, at least for the --timeout part.
So, If I updated automount's timeout value with a timeout value of 10 mins and reload autofs service, would it automatically unmount the idle clients after 10 minutes?

According to the Linux man page, the default duration is 2 minutes and maximum duration is 10 minutes.

Are you sure that any of the 513 mounts you're concerned about aren't being used? (Note that if someone changed directory into a directory under the mount point, that mount point will be "in use" until that process and all of its children exit or change directory to some directory that is not under that mount point.)

@Don Cragun,

Yes, I am very much sure most of the client mounts are unused. The performance of the NFS server is stable though, i.e. no immediate load because of the number of clients.
But I wanted to know if there is a way I could unmount the idle clients.
I had written a shell script using output of 'showmount -a' where I can : get all the current NFS clients, the mount points. I can run 'umount <mount_point>' using a for loop but it seemed so extravagant.

I would be happy to share all the script details and the errors it throws to you could help me out.

Thank you