> I have my machine setup to mount a disk on another (Debian) linux machine. > Unfortunately when I was rebooting my system, the other machine didn't > want to serve me, so my machine hung with: > > NFS server ottifant not responding, still trying. > > > Now the obvious solution is to fix up the other machine, but the thing > which worried me most was the fact that the attempt to nfs mount didn't > timeout. Which means that my system is entirely dependent on the other > system in order to boot. > > Why is this so?
I am guessing that something is probably trying to access a file on the NFS mounted drive. You could try using the soft option when mounting it. >From the nfs man page: soft If an NFS file operation has a major time out then report an I/O error to the calling program. The default is to continue retry ing NFS file operations indefinitely. Alternatively, use amd to automount the drive as necessary. That works really nicely. Steve