On Tue, 2007-04-10 at 11:06 -0700, Jim Carter wrote: > On Tue, 10 Apr 2007, Ian Kent wrote: > > > The inode access times aren't (and never were) used to determine > > timeout. So the words "Access times" might end up being be misleading. > > ... > > Prior to version 5 update this was updated for any access. So "busy" > > could be loosely defined as "any access". > > > > Following the version 5 update it is only updated if the mount is really > > busy. This means only if at least one process working directory or any > > open file is within the filesystem at the time of an expire check... > > So if my mail monitor stats my mailbox, on an otherwise unused automounted > filesystem, every few seconds, the filesystem would be eligible to be > unmounted but would be remounted a few seconds later. And similarly if the > KDE or Gnome desktop used the same strategy on remote directories, we hope > not too many of them. A lot of sysops complain about this behavior.
Agreeded but I had to do something. Having direct mount functionality that works was a very high priority. > > The "right" way to handle the issue is if the application uses FAM to > detect changes, not the stupid polling. But if network FAM is enabled and > you set a watch on the mailbox, and the filesystem is then unmounted, will > local FAM maintain the net connection to FAM on the the residence host? > I have no idea, and in any case this is not a relevant issue for autofs. Don't think that autofs would fit the use of FAM particularly well. But I'll investigate that and see. > > Or alternatively the application could fork a process that would cwd to the > containing directory, preventing unmounting. That's a lot of overhead > particularly for a desktop with lots of folders. autofs doesn't have enough information available to it to sensibly use this approach. > > You want to encourage unmounting, particularly with NFSv4 which has its > own unmounting paradigm, because if the server is rebooted you'll end up > with a stale NFS filehandle on all mounted filesystems, which in my > experience does not self-heal reliably. Yep, so I'm half way there. Ian _______________________________________________ autofs mailing list [email protected] http://linux.kernel.org/mailman/listinfo/autofs
