nfs automount

fourhead · Posted: Sat May 08, 2004 1:58 am Post subject: nfs automount

i've set up two gentoo boxes to share a few directories to each other. i have nfs and nfsmount in default runlevels on both machines, and i have nfs entries in /etc/fstab so that the nfs shares get mounted on boot.

of course, when the other machine is powered off when i boot one machine, the nfs share can't get mounted. the same happens when i power off one machine, the other one can't cleanly unmount the share when being powered off too.

from what i know i could just set up automount to avoid this, so automount would quickly mount the appropiate share when i access a mountpoint, and it would unmount the share after a few seconds when it's not used. what i'm wondering though is if a behaviour like this can't be realized with nfs only, i just dislike the idea of having more and more daemons running in the background, although they of course don't really eat up a lot of cpu & memory :-)

how did you set up your nfs shares for autmounting? any other ideas how this could be done or would you just recommend automount?

thanks,
tom

kezzla · Posted: Sat May 08, 2004 2:32 am Post subject:

Automountd uses the "soft" option so mounts timeout. You can try setting soft as mount options for your regular nfs mounts.

fourhead · Posted: Sat May 08, 2004 11:50 am Post subject:

oh thanks i'll try that. but i guess i'll still have the problem that when i switch one computer on and the second one is turned off, the shares don't get mounted, and then when i turn the second one on too, i still can't access the shares!? well i'll try it. i also thought about supermount which i'm using for my dvd rom, as far as i know it's not limited to cd roms right?

tom