cifs client timeouts and hard/soft mounts

[Steve French]

On Sun, Dec 5, 2010 at 8:06 PM, Jeff Layton <jlayton at samba.org> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
I am more worried about firewall rule changes and similar events
than about broken servers - but the idea of waiting forever on stat
to a server that is never going to respond seems odd.

-- 
Thanks,

Steve