There are some options you should consider adding at once. They govern the way the NFS client handles a server crash or network outage. One of the cool things about NFS is that it can handle this gracefully. If you set up the clients right. There are two distinct failure modes:
The NFS client will report an error to the process accessing a file on a NFS mounted file system. Some programs can handle this with composure, most won't. I cannot recommend using this setting, it is a recepie for corrupted files and lost data. You should especially not use this for mail disks --- if you value your mail that is.
The program accessing a file on a NFS mounted file system will hang
when the server crashes. The process cannot be interrupted or
killed unless you also specify intr
. When the NFS server is
back online the program will continue undisturbed from where it
were. This is probably what you want. I recommend using
hard,intr
on all NFS mounted file systems.
Picking up the previous example, this is now your fstab entry:
# Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass# ... eris:/mn/eris/local /mnt nfs rsize=1024,wsize=1024,hard,intr 0 0 ...