3.7.0 HP StorageWorks HP Scalable NAS File Serving Software administration guide - HP Scalable NAS 3.7 for Linux (AG513-96002, October 2009)

Client mount options
Soft and hard mounts can be characterized by how they handle errors.
• Hard: When an NFS client with a hard-mounted share requests a file, it keeps
trying until either it succeeds or someone interrupts its attempts. You can use the
intr and nointr options to specify whether you want users to be able to inter-
rupt an NFS request.
• Soft: When an NFS client with a soft-mounted share requests a file, it tries to re-
ceive the file a specified number of times (retrans) and each try waits for a
specified amount of time (timeo). After this, if the file has not been received,
NFS will return an I/O error to the process on the client machine requesting the
file.
Following are some of the important parameters:
Hard Mount Parameters:
Specify intr if users are not likely to damage critical data by manually interrupting
an NFS request. If a hard mount is interruptible, a user can press Ctrl-C or issue
the kill command to interrupt an NFS mount that is hanging indefinitely because
a server is down.
intr
Specify nointr if users might damage critical data by manually interrupting an
NFS request, and you would rather have the system hang while the server is down
than risk losing data between the client and the server.
nointr
Soft Mount Parameters:
The timeout, in tenths of a second, for NFS requests. The maximum value for
timeo is 30 (3 seconds) and the default value is 7 (0.7 seconds). Try doubling
the timeo value if you see several “servers not responding” messages within a
few minutes. This can occur because you are mounting directories across a
gateway, because your server is slow, or because your network is busy with heavy
traffic.
timeo
The number of times an NFS request is retransmitted after it times out. If the request
does not succeed after the specified number of retransmissions, an error is returned.
The default value is 4. Increase the retrans value for a directory that is
soft-mounted from a server that has frequent, short periods of down time. This
gives the server sufficient time to recover so that the soft mount does not return an
error.
retrans
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