Re: No nfs, no boot

[Steve Hsieh <steveh@eecs.umich.edu>]

> I have my machine setup to mount a disk on another (Debian) linux machine.
> Unfortunately when I was rebooting my system, the other machine didn't
> want to serve me, so my machine hung with:
> 
> NFS server ottifant not responding, still trying.
> 
> 
> Now the obvious solution is to fix up the other machine, but the thing
> which worried me most was the fact that the attempt to nfs mount didn't
> timeout.  Which means that my system is entirely dependent on the other
> system in order to boot.
> 
> Why is this so?

I am guessing that something is probably trying to access a file on the
NFS mounted drive. You could try using the soft option when mounting it.
>From the nfs man page:

       soft           If an NFS file operation has a major  time­
                      out then report an I/O error to the calling
                      program.  The default is to continue retry­
                      ing NFS file operations indefinitely.

Alternatively, use amd to automount the drive as necessary.  That works
really nicely.

Steve