flee@shire.cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) (06/09/89)
We have a gaggle of semi-autonomous machines: Sun4s, IBM RTs, each with its own disks. We use the automounter to mount people's home directories (among other things). The problem is when a machine goes away%. Any process NFS-busy on that machine's disk gets hosed until the machine comes back. This is not unreasonable (although redundant volumes might be nice). The real problem is that *everyone* who mounts from that machine eventually gets hosed. Because getwd() eventually tries to stat() all the filesystems in /etc/mtab (to recreate /tmp/.getwd). Not very friendly. "Remove the /tmp/.getwd efficiency hack" is not sufficient. You can still get screwed if you have NFS directories mounted on the same level. "Don't use NFS" is inconvenient. I'm not sure I can convince anyone this is a good idea unless there's an alternative. Does anyone have any suggestions? Is there some magic NFS incantation that will cure the common cold? NFS seems adequate for client/fileserver types, but seems lacking for equal peers. % The automounter sometimes goes away, but that's a different story. -- Felix Lee flee@shire.cs.psu.edu *!psuvax1!shire!flee