Desktop freeze on NFS share failure

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Sun, 2015-08-16 at 14:11 -0400, Adam Batkin wrote:
> On 08/16/2015 07:01 AM, Rex Dieter wrote:
> > Emmett Culley wrote:
> > 
> > > Why does the desktop freeze whenever an NFS share fails?  I have 
> > > set all
> > > NFS mounts to soft,intr and yet, if I forget to unmount a share 
> > > before
> > > taking down the NFS server, my desktop freezes.
> > > 
> > > Luckily I have Yakauke running, so I can at least get to a 
> > > console.  But
> > > of course the NFS mount cannot be umounted if it doesn't respond.
> > > 
> > > Also I assumed the setting shares to intr, soft would prevent 
> > > other
> > > software from hanging if the share stops responding.  Is that not 
> > > so?  Or
> > > is there another setting I am not aware of?
> > > 
> > > Any ideas how to prevent this from happening?
> > 
> > 
> > It not *that* different to when a (mounted) disk stops working. 
> >  I'd
> > recommend focusing on simply avoiding that situation.
> 
> I assume that you were referring to local (physical) disks.
> 
> Regardless, I disagree: Failure happens and software should at least 
> *attempt* to be resilient.
> 
> If I'm asking Konqueror or Dolphin to access a broken mount (local or 
> network) then I understand if it hangs (though that could be avoided 
> too, even if it just displays a "loading" indicator since it 
> obviously 
> can't get any further).
> 
> But for general operations I would expect that nothing should hang. 
> This 
> is a solvable problem, and suggesting that people should avoid hung 
> mounts isn't helpful given that usually (this particular situation 
> excepted) they are totally unavoidable. A hung desktop is never 
> acceptable.

+1

poc