NFS Mount Point Strategy?

[System Admin Mike Peterson]

We have just got NFS working between our Apollo systems and SGI/IBM boxes,
and I have a few questions about the "right" way to set things up:

1) What options should I use on various systems for the mount command
   (e.g. soft vs. hard, use bg or not, use 'hard,bg', retry counts,
   timeouts)?

2) What directory structure is best for the actual mount points:
   a) mount "system:/dir" on /system_dir and let the users refer to 
      /system_dir/..... ?
   b) mount "system:/dir" on /nfs/system_dir and let the users refer to 
      /system_dir/..... where /system_dir is a link to /nfs/system_dir
      (so that the user reference point is 1 link removed from the
      actual mount point)?
   c) mount "system:/dir" on /mnt/system_dir and let the users refer to 
      /system_dir/..... where /system_dir is a link to /nfs/system_dir
      and /nfs/system_dir is a link to /mnt/system_dir
      (so that the user reference point is 2 links removed from the
      actual mount point)?
   The purpose behind b) and c) is to avoid having users directly
   accessing the mount point in case the foreign file system becomes
   unavilable (so they can escape from the attempted access?, or so the
   mount point is clear for remounting?) ?

3) Does the answer to 2) depend on the answer to 1), and/or the
   reliability of the systems involved?

4) What naming schemes are used to handle the large number of potential
   NFS mounts (for example, Physics/Astronomy/CITA here give each
   disk/partition a name (of a tree from the forest), and Apollo
   suggests systemname_dir; I can see advantages of both schemes since
   the former makes disk names consistent everywhere and users don't
   need to know what physical systems files really reside on, whereas 
   the latter brings some order, especially for the sysadmin)?
-- 
Mike Peterson, System Administrator, U/Toronto Department of Chemistry
E-mail: system at alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca
Tel: (416) 978-7094                  Fax: (416) 978-8775