Re: Informix on NFS

>When Informix opens the database, it first determines which file systems >are NFS mounted (if any). We have an MVS file system NFS mounted and >if there is a problem on the MVS side, the database open "hangs" for a >very long period of time. There are NO databases on any NFS mounted >file, so is there a way to bypass this check by Informix? I ran into this problem a couple of years ago using SE 5 on an IBM RS/6000. It took me forever just to convince Informix that it was a problem. I kept hearing such noise as "We are doing something propriety that we must do but we can't tell you what or why." They never did give me a patch or work around. It was enough for me to decide not to purchase Informix software support again. They did say that they might fix it in an future version, but I would have to call ever 6 months or so and ask someone if some bug fix number has been included in the current version. I lost the bug fix number, probably threw it in the trash along with the rest of the Informix support papers. There are two things I have done to solve the problem. First discourage nfs mounts on the machine. Second use automount on ALL nfs mounts. The automount flags I use are -tl 30 and -tw 30. These flags tell automount to unmount filesystems that have not been used within 30 seconds. This greatly reduces the chance of an nfs filesystem being mounted when a server fails. The down side is that access to nfs files take longer because the filesystems must continually be remounted. This also affects how long it takes Informix to open a database. If a server is down it takes longer because automount has to timeout trying to mount the filesystem of the down server, but the database does eventually get open. Bruce Bramhall bruce@tkg.com These comments are my opinions not those of my employeer.