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At some point hitherto, Jon hath spake thusly:
> I've been using NFS for a while now to mount my home directories and mp3
> partition onto my other computers in the house (all linux
> boxes).  When I tried to NFS mount the BSD source it mounted fine, however
> when I tried to do an 'ls' on the source BSD would hang.

Check the logs on both servers and see if there's anything useful
regarding NFS that shows up around the time you try this.  

> I can't even kill -9 the ls pid!

If you look at the process with 

  $ ps aux |egrep "USER|ls"

You'll see something like this:

  USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
  ddm      20937  0.0  0.6  1728  792 pts/5    D    19:22   0:00 ls -F

Notice the status is 'D" which means the process is in "Disk wait
state" or "I/O wait state" (which are different names for the same
thing).  You can not kill a process in this state, even with a SIGKILL
signal.  The process will die if/when the I/O request has been
completed.  If it doesn't complete for some reason (like waiting on
NFS that's broken) it will never die.

If the kernel allowed you to kill a process that was in I/O wait
state, it could result in filesystem corruption.

You can prevent this from happening by using the intr option to the
mount command.  That'll allow you to interrupt an NFS I/O that hangs.

You can also use the `soft' option to mount, but I've never seen
anyone recommend it, and I understand it can also cause FS corruption.

HTH

- -- 
Derek Martin               ddm@pizzashack.org    
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