nfs mounting will hang a machine on bootup

[Remko Lodder]

ECEG / Daniel Duerr wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Had a very strange issue this week with my Freebsd 6.2 server on a p7
> kernel compiled on Aug 5.  Did a customary reboot on a machine which has
> an NFS mount in its fstab.  The machine didn't come back up, could not
> be reached by SSH, but could be pinged.  I drove 1.5 hours to the data
> center where the machine resides and discovered that it was hanging
> trying to mount the NFS share on the other machine -- looping through a
> permission denied scenario and never continuing on with the bootup for
> the entire 1.5 hours.
> 
> I have two suggestions here, whether one, the other, or both make sense:
> 
> 1) Move the sshd startup before the NFS mounting so that I can SSH into
> the machine to fix this issue.
> 2) If an NFS mount fails after X tries, just continue booting up and
> allow the situation to be remedied later.
> 
> I apologize in advance if I am missing some obvious parameter.  For what
> its worth, I followed the NFS setup described in the freebsd handbook on
> freebsd.org
> 
> Cheers,
> Daniel

Hello Daniel,

Did you try background mounting the nfs share? If it fails for x times
(dunno how many times), then the mounting goes in the background and
the system continues to boot, periodically trying to mount the nfs share.

Cheers
remko

-- 
Kind regards,

     Remko Lodder               ** remko at elvandar.org
     FreeBSD                    ** remko at FreeBSD.org

     /* Quis custodiet ipsos custodes */