Working around NFS hangs

[sawyl]

Thanks to the catharsis obtained through the release of all my bilious choler into my last update and thanks in no small measure to a double espresso, I managed to squeeze in enough work before hometime to prevent the day from being a total waste.

The gist of my cleverness is that after years of complaining about the impossibility of preventing df from hanging at the first sign of an NFS glitch, I bothered to the think about the problem for all of thirty seconds and lo, an answer presented itself. I came to the happy conclusion that I could open the dot directory on the target file system and then use the resulting descriptor with fstatfs to obtain usage figures and effectly dodge the path–to–device lookup badness that hobbles statfs.

Now all I have to do is sit back and wait for an NFS server crash so that I can test it. Going on past experience, I shouldn't have all that long to wait.

Comments

[vincel.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting idea. Like you said, we shouldn't have to wait too long to try it.

[sawyl.livejournal.com]

It doesn't even have to be a full on failure, an RFS outage would probably be good enough...