Autofs causing failed shutdown attempts

[Richard Hobbs]

Hello,

We have a network of roughly 65 machines, all of which use autofs and
/etc/auto.rmt to automatically mount various directories across the network.

However, when there is a powercut and the UPS batteries get low, everything
tries to shut down. The problem with this is that 90% of the machines hang
when trying to unmount the remote filesystems... Even if the remote machine
is still available! If the main fileserver gets shutdown before everything
else, for example, then nothing else gets shut down cleanly because they all
hang while they're waiting to cleanly unmount the remote filesystem.

Is there a way we can stop this happening? Can we tell linux if it can't
unmount stuff after x minutes, just give up and shut down anyway??

Any help with this is greatly appreciated, as we have just had an extended
powercut... Twice! This affected us in a large way each time.

Thanks in advance,
Hobbs.

-- 
Richard Hobbs (Systems Administrator)
Toshiba Research Europe Ltd. - Speech Technology Group
Web: http://www.toshiba-europe.com/research/
Email: richard.hobbs at crl.toshiba.co.uk
Tel: +44 1223 376964        Mobile: +44 7811 803377



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