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fstab and nfs

This is a quicky. I’ve been very busy here, been studying hard for the linux+ and trying my best to get as good as I possibly can. I’ve tipped a point to where progress is now quick (relatively) as I think my foundation is solid. I’m excited to add it to my comptia certs and move on to security+.

I have two Proxmox hosts in quorum who share their storage with each other. I don’t have a SAN, so two raid arrays of 2.7TB shared over NFS to each other functions nearly the same allowing me to migrate vm’s without having the move the actual vdisks. Now yesterday I attempted to upgrade to proxmox 5.0 in a hurry and didn’t take any backups, assuming I have good luck or some crazy idea. So that went terribly and the installation masked all my services so my booted servers just set there like dummies. I tried to poke around and fix but soon figured it be quicker to just re-install proxmox as I had backups on both raid arrays plus a 2TB NAS of all my VM’s. This is where the issue came up. I never realized before what my fstab settings were for my nfs shares and it dawned on me how important they can be. In my circumstance, two host are booting at the same time and trying to initialize their NFS services as well as connect to NFS shares on each other, both of which relay on networking services. The complications are obvious when we take a moment to just realize the predicament. So quick notes…

 

  • nofail will allow the system to continue booting if mounting the share fails
  • noauto can be used if you just want the nfs share to not be mounted until you call it
  • retry=### can be used if you don’t want the system to give up right away, (useful if the target nfs system is still booting)