Mounting multiple NFS shares to the same point

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Tillman Hodgson wrote:

>>Could you use something like ssh to transfer the files rather than 
>>needing NFS?  (I don't know if you mentioned what the NFS-end box was...).
>>    
>>
>
>That's a good idea. In this case the NFS-end box is an Infrant appliance
>so I don't think I can use scp. I'll check deeper into it -- if it can
>do scp, that gives me more options.
>  
>
No idea what an Infrant appliance is, but makes ssh less likely.

>>I'm also not clear why you think that keeping the NFS partition mounted 
>>all the time is so bad.  If there is no access then surely the overhead 
>>is minimal.
>>    
>>
>
>That's true, there's no real performance hit. It's not the overhead I'm
>worried about, it's minimizing the exposure of the backups volume to
>problems. A network filesystem that isn't mounted is one that's much
>harder to accidently rm files from and such :-)
>  
>
Yes, that's certainly an issue.  Presumably you can lock down the 
directory perms to be root only or root/operator though.  Depending on 
setup and money, backing up the backups to tape would give more safeguards.

>>Your other alternative is to use lockfiles to control when things get 
>>mounted/unmounted.  If the control file is locked, you wait until it's 
>>unlocked (or bomb with an error, whatever).  Trivial in perl, and 
>>lockf(1) looks like the way to go with shell.
>>    
>>
>
>That's the scripting magic that I mentioned. It looks like this is
>likely the best solution with my current volume arrangement. In
>hindsight, I think should've used three shares instead of one and then
>the daily, weekly and monthly mounts wouldn't conflict with each other.
>  
>
Can you mount sub-directories from the share as separate mounts?  E.g. 
create simple directories called daily, weekly and monthly on the share, 
and mount each separately?  Then you'd just have to move some files 
around rather than re-create the share.  Plus with a single share you 
don't have to decide in advance how much space each specific directory 
needs.

Hth,

--Alex