is NFS production-ready ?

[Brian Candler]

On Tue, Apr 11, 2006 at 05:59:50PM +0400, dima wrote:
> > I built a big mail/web cluster a few years ago using FreeBSD 4.x (4.6.2 I
> > think), where all the front-ends used NFS to access data on a shared
> > fileserver platform (NetApp). It worked without a hitch, and still does.
> 
> What is the reaction on network/NAS failure?
> I mean, I'm about to provide transparent storage service in the case of failures of different types.

It never came up as an issue. The backend was a clustered NetApp pair, so if
one failed, the other head-end would take over the disks belonging to the
first one, and continue to serve from the same IP address.

However, I believe that if you do a "soft" mount, and the server goes away,
eventually the client will get an I/O error. The client program has to be
written in such a way as it will handle I/O errors in all situations (and
many are not)

Regards,

Brian.