Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> writes:
Unix just doesn't seem to be designed that way. Consider the case of NFS mounts which block everything on any network outage. When running the latest KDE if you have an NFS server become unresponsive then it causes most of the desktop environment to become unusable too, even if the NFS mount was under /mnt (IE not in the path and not used by most programs).
Um, that's by design. If you want applications to receive an error instead of blocking until NFS becomes available again, mount with -o soft instead of -o hard. The same soft-vs-hard binding decision is available in PADL libpam-ldap and libnss-ldap, amongst other things. I don't know why your KDE system would be reading a filesystem in /mnt, though, if you didn't tell it to -- that sounds like a "feature" you should ask the KDE community how to disable. It's probably something trivial and silly like the KDE filesystem abstraction library checking how full each fs is every tenth of a second. I know GNOME does that even for NFS filesystems -- I find it a bit annoying that as soon as /srv/share/read-only fills above X%, a popup appears on every prisoner desktop at once :-/