NFS problem

I am having the following annoying problem:

Box A is NFS-mounting a file system that resides on box B. For some
reason, box B has suddenly died. All of sudden, two things happen in A:

1) The df command in A hangs forever, and any efforts to kill it are
useless.

2) Under ordinary conditions, the load in A hovers about 1. After B dies,
the load shoots up to 5 or so, and stays up there indefinitely.
Additionally, ps awux shows no particular process sucking up lots of
cycles, which makes me think that it is the kernel itself the one that is
doing so.

How can one fix this, without rebooting A? I have tried to stop the
NFS-related stuff in A, to no avail.

On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 01:40:38 +0000, Augustus SFX van Dusen wrote:

> How can one fix this, without rebooting A?

You don't.

On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 at 01:40 GMT, Augustus SFX van Dusen wrote:
> I am having the following annoying problem:
>
> Box A is NFS-mounting a file system that resides on box B. For some
> reason, box B has suddenly died. All of sudden, two things happen in A:
>
> 1) The df command in A hangs forever, and any efforts to kill it are
> useless.
>
> 2) Under ordinary conditions, the load in A hovers about 1. After B dies,
> the load shoots up to 5 or so, and stays up there indefinitely.
> Additionally, ps awux shows no particular process sucking up lots of
> cycles, which makes me think that it is the kernel itself the one that is
> doing so.
>
> How can one fix this, without rebooting A? I have tried to stop the
> NFS-related stuff in A, to no avail.

umount -f <dir>

--
Chris F.A. Johnson http://cfaj.freeshell.org/shell
================================================== =================
My code (if any) in this post is copyright 2005, Chris F.A. Johnson
and may be copied under the terms of the GNU General Public License

On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 01:40:38 GMT, Augustus SFX van Dusen <ASFXvD@story.net> wrote:

> I am having the following annoying problem:
>
> Box A is NFS-mounting a file system that resides on box B. For some
> reason, box B has suddenly died. All of sudden, two things happen in A:
>
> 1) The df command in A hangs forever, and any efforts to kill it are
> useless.
>
> 2) Under ordinary conditions, the load in A hovers about 1. After B dies,
> the load shoots up to 5 or so, and stays up there indefinitely.
> Additionally, ps awux shows no particular process sucking up lots of
> cycles, which makes me think that it is the kernel itself the one that is
> doing so.

Next time you mount nfs use the "intr" option. Also look at "hard" vs. "soft".
and decide which you prefer.