Emergency shutdown and NFS

[Dan Watts]

Background:

  Personal Iris
  Irix 3.3
  Local 350MB and 700MB drive
  NFS exported partitions
  NFS mounted partitions


The problem:

  During a power outage today, I found that the SGI wouldn't shutdown
  correctly (It has it's own standby ups, so yes it had power :-).
  When told to shutdown, I got the normal "click if you mean it" and
  then the system started shuting down.  Problem was, that the remote
  mounted NFS node had died when the power went out, no ups there :-(
  I got repeated errors from umount that it was timing out, and the
  shutdown didn't go any further.  I finally had to turn off the power
  since the battery time had reached maximum.  When I rebooted, sure
  enough, the local disks hadn't gotten unmounted and I had to wait for
  fsck to run (Zzzzzz....) If I'd had the time to wait it out, would it
  have finally given up and gone on?  Should I change my fstab entry?
  Is there a way to make shutdown umount the local disks first and then
  try the NFS ones?  At least I wouldn't have to run fsck when I rebooted.
  The origonal fstab entry follows:

     puff:/usr/export/home/amiga   /puff/amiga   nfs rw,soft 0 0

  I've since changed it in the hopes that this will help, but haven't
  the time to check yet.  The following is my new entry:

     puff:/usr/export/home/amiga   /puff/amiga   nfs bg,rw,soft,retry=2 0 0

  All suggestions appreciated.
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