Fault tolerant NFS - possible?
We're using a couple of NFS-mounts to share software-repositories (patches, servicepacks etc.) across two datacenters but it seems that this is not the most fault tolerant solution in the world.
If the network between the two locations goes down the server acting as NFS-client starts building up load to a point where it becomes unusable. The CPU is more or less idle but the average load goes up from the second the link between the servers are broken. Restoring the connection may or may not solve the problem and reduce the load again.
It's usually impossible to unmount the NFS mount on the client side once the connection to the server is gone - sometimes a restart of netfs may help but most of the times it just hangs while trying to restart.
The real killer is the fact that we cannot even reboot the server remotely - it'll hang, trying to unmount the stale NFS mount and must be reset manually. That is just SO wonderful in the middle of the night....NOT!
Does anyone know of a way to make this crap a bit more foregiving or is NFS just not suited for sharing mounts via networks....? ;-)
