[tech] Re: broken/down apache?

[Nick Bannon]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2000 at 04:48:18PM +0800, Grahame Bowland wrote:
> /services should have mounted on bootup - its in fstab. Strange - what
> happens if mermaid comes up before mola and can't mount /services or
> /home - does it keep trying until mola comes up or just give up?

Well, mola _does_ take longer to start up - it's a slower machine,
running a bigger OS, in less RAM, with plenty of slow disk space to fsck.

Meanwhile, if other machines can't mount it, they eventually have to
time out. If we used the "bg" mount option, they could keep retrying in
the background, which might be good.

If they're already mounted and the NFS server goes down for a while,
then by default they retry forever. (the alternative is a "soft mount",
which will return an I/O error after retries and timeouts)

> Is there some way to have it periodically check that /home and /services
> are mounted and remount them if necessary?

As Anil said - cron. Moray (and now mooneye) have this in their root
crontab ;
*/15 * * * * /bin/mount -a -t nfs > /dev/null

I'm in two minds as to whether it's a good idea - things could very
confusing if you unmount something for a reason and it comes back.

Another approach might be to use the kernel automounter.

Nick.

-- 
  Nick Bannon  | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick at it.net.au | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal