NFS and lost connections

[Colin Brace]

Hi all,

I customarily mount several (W)LAN NFS shares on my laptop running
Ubuntu (7.10). I try to remember to close any open files and manually
dismount them when I take the laptop off the LAN, but sometimes I
forgot, or the cable falls out, or, if I am using wireless, the
connection momentarily falters. In such cases, something trashes the
system. I can't unmount and remount the NFS shares; nautilus no longer
works, nor do the open file dialogs in my gnome apps, presumably
because I have the NFS mounts bookmarked.

I try restarting NFS, networking, udev, HAL, dbus, X, anything else I
can think of to no avail. The only remedy is to reboot.

The problem seems to arise in particular when files are open on the
NFS shares or a share is opened in a nautilus window. If this isn't
the case, usually I can umount and remount the share without further
problems.

I seem to recall earlier versions of Ubuntu being more forgiving about
lost NFS mounts. In 7.10, some subsystem is getting hosed, but I can't
figure out which one, hence I am reluctant to open a bug report.

Any ideas?

-- 
  Colin Brace
  Amsterdam