cifs client timeouts and hard/soft mounts

[Jeff Layton]

On Sun, 5 Dec 2010 19:42:30 -0600
Steve French <smfrench at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 2:12 AM, Volker Lendecke
> <Volker.Lendecke at sernet.de>wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Dec 03, 2010 at 09:28:11PM -0500, Jeff Layton wrote:
> > > So, what does this mean for CIFS clients? I believe that the best
> > > behavior for the client is to *never* time out an individual request,
> > > aside from SMB echoes.
> >
> > I like this concept.
> >
> >
> That will break apps that can't take ctl-c though ...
> 

How will waiting indefinitely for a response break applications?
Returning an error just because the server is slow seems far more
likely to break applications.

Now, in the (IMO unlikely) event that a server is responding to
echoes but not other calls, you'd have an that application will hang
until someone kills it. I think that's acceptable however:

It's an unlikely situation, and anyone who has a client faced with it
has a way to recover from the hang. They can kill the application. The
server in this case would be clearly broken however.

-- 
Jeff Layton <jlayton at samba.org>