[NCLUG] NFS question

[Michael Dwyer]

Incidently, SCO apparently allows for Soft, Hard, and "Spongy" mounts.
Heh

Spongy
sets soft semantics for stat, lookup, fsstat, readlink, and readdir NFS
operations and hard semantics for all other NFS operations on the
filesystem. Spongy mounts are preferable to soft mounts because spongy
mounts will not time out during read and write operations. They are
recommended for slow, long-distance, or unreliable links, and for
unreliable servers.

----- Original Message -----
From: <quent at pobox.com>


> I don't know how pervasive it is, but it used to be that software,
even
> vendor supplied /bin kinds of things, didn't check the return status
of
> the "write" system call. Authors assumed that if a write failed it was
due
> to hardware problems and the kernel would balk before their code would
> sense it.  With soft NFS mounts those kinds of programs won't detect a
> write failure but a write failure on a hard mount hangs your program.
>
> There's got to be a better reason than that and I have to wonder
> why the feature exists if it's so evil.
>
> Quent
>
> On Thu, Sep 27, 2001 at 01:23:26PM -0600, Mike Loseke wrote:
> >
> >  I'd like to hear some first-hand experiences about people using the
> > "-soft" option when mounting NFS mounts. Man pages in Linux, Solaris
and
> > HP-UX all discourage its use with no real reason. Opinionated Sun
employees
> > call it evil. Have you ever seen any issues arise from its use? Ever
solve
> > any problem with it? Ever lose any data with it?