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Be very careful
Authored by: theegor on Oct 27, '02 07:50:54AM

Heh, you have just described SMB. The semantics of SMB are very similar to the semantics of NFS soft mounts. If the NT redirector sees a timeout on an SMB packet, it sends an error to the application. Some apps register an error handler and can deal with the error (I believe MS apps such as Word can absorb the error). But many can't, and they are terminated by the OS! Where as UNIX systems post a read/write error I believe (unfortunately many apps handle such errors ungracefully). SMB on OS X probably behaves like NFS soft mounts ... I haven't tested it yet though.

NFS offers you a choice for how you can lose your data. For hard mounts, your application thread will lock-up reading or writing to a file on a downed server. If this is Finder, you are screwed until the server returns. Otherwise reboot with data loss. For soft mounts, you can suffer a connection time-out, permitting you to recover Finder and the other threads interacting with the file server, but with potential data loss.

If there is a chance the server can return in a reasonable time (e.g. a corporate setting with home directories on the NFS server), you probably want hard mounts, but your machine will be highly unusable in the mean time.



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