SUMMARY: How long does a failed nfs mount hang at boot?

Hello, and thanks for the many responses I received.

Rick Niziak,
Alan Pae,
Michael Horton,
Neil Dombrowski,
Tim Chipman,
David harrington,
Frank Smith,
Michael Connolly,
Matthew Stier,
and others

The most common answer was: it will wait almost forever if you use the 
default values, which is hard mount and foreground (fg). Some people 
suggested a few minutes, but I've personnally waited for at least an hour.

I wonder why fg is the default. There must be a good reason.

The solution is to add the option background (bg) in vfstab if hard 
mount (default), which is what I did and it works grand. There is a 
delay of 1 minute, since the default timeo option is 600 tenths of a 
second for connection-oriented transports, but after that the retries 
(10 000 by default it seems, according to man mount_nfs) are done in the 
background and normal boot process can continue.

Some people suggested a soft mount, but according to man mount_nfs, 
there is a risk of data corruption during writes (which is what I'm doing).

Just an off-topnc remark concerning Windows SFU nfs: not reliable under 
load according to my tests. Writing 5000 small files crashed totally the 
Windows nfs share twice, and the only solution for the Windows admin was 
to erase the shared directory and recreate it. It seems that it's a 
problem of max number of threads on Windows side.

Thanks again,

Rami

Below my original post:

> I have an unreliable (Windows SFU: not my choice: that's what they have 
> on the other side) remote nfs server on which I have to mount a 
> directory of my Solaris 8 box. The mount is in my vfstab, with no 
> options, which should mean that it's a hard mount.
> 
> At the boot sequence, /etc/rc2.d/S73nfs.client is before the startup of 
> my database, which causes a lag in the startup of my database.
> 
> In case the remote nfs server is not up, I was wondering how long it 
> would be retrying before continuing with the normal boot procedure.
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