[936] in Athena Bugs
hard mount of homedir
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Harrington)
Thu Sep 15 13:42:28 1988
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 88 13:41:39 EDT
From: Joe Harrington <jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
I have been told that homedirs are now going to be hard mounted.
This is a problem. There are several nets on campus which are not so
firmly connected to the spine as E40. Building 54, for example, is
connected via the broadband network, which is inherently flaky for
short-to-medium periods of time. Since we have some local filespace,
we often use pieces of the filesystem which are not attached from
off-LAN, and can thus get quite a bit of work done even when the net
is highly flaky (in fact, much of that local filespace is used to hold
what is normally accessed via RVD's, and we now have our RT's on a
local RVD server). Unless my understanding is completely wrong, NFS
hard mounts will make the machines grind to a halt whenever the net
flakes out, rather than giving nice error messages and letting us
work. Since short-to-medium can mean 5 minutes to most of a day, this
can effectively render the cluster useless.
Is there any particular reason why we must hard-mount the home
directory? It worked fine before. Can we offer soft mounts as an
option for some people (hairy, I know)?
--jh--
