I have a case where I have one machine that has numerous NFS mounts. Once in a while, one of the NFS servers loses its devices due to a hardware issue that requires a reboot to fix.
Then, users come along via something like ftp, do an ls on a directory and it hangs. Then they typically get frustrated and try again. This ends up hanging the client machine by using up all of the ftp sessions.
Is there any way to get NFS to just drop the mount, so that when they do an ls they just get an empty directory? Or is there some way for me to detect when an NFS host isn't responding properly and drop it? ... Or can I do this from the server side somehow when drives are gone?