Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Hard and Soft Mounts in NFS

This is a UNIX terminology as to what the client does when it can't talk to an NFS Server. If you just mount a file system without specifying hard or soft, the default is a hard mount. Hard mounts are preferable because of the stateless nature of NFS. If a client sends an I/O request to the server (such as an ls -la), and the server gets rebooted, the client will wait until the server comes back on line. This preserves data transfers in the event of a server failure. There are disadvantages to this, as a simple mount request could hang. A soft mount will return with an error and fail. This kills the wait time, but can cause problems with data transfers.

No comments: