handling unresonsive NFS servers

[Eric Anderson]

Jim Rees wrote:
> Afs has the same problem, and solves it by marking a server "down" when it
> doesn't respond.  The timeout is very long, like a minute or more.  Normally
> this would permanently hang the client, but once the server is marked down,
> any subsequent operations fail immediately.  The client checks periodically
> to see if the server has come back up.  Failing this way is better than
> waiting forever, because waiting forever results in a reboot when the
> machine's owner runs out of patience.



For 'fail immediately', what does that mean?  It returns EIO?  That 
might be sufficient, although I think 1min is pretty low for NFS.  Of 
course, if it's settable, then that's good. :)

Eric