What is difference between Hard and Soft mount?

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Jayakrishnan G Naik

  • Aug 25th, 2006
 

Hard mount  in unix in the normal filesystem mount mainly used to mount local filesystems. The filesystem will be in the mounted state until you unmount it manually.

Soft mount is an option that is very useful for mounting network filesystems say nfs filesystem so that soft mount will allow automatic unmount if the filesystem is idle for a specified time period

Eg. can be used with autofs

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Hardmount in Unix is is the same as the normal filesystem mount used mainly for mounting local filesysytems.Once a filesystem is hard mounted you should use umount command to unmount it.It remains mounted till you umount itSoft mount on the other hand allows automatic unmounting if the filesystem is idle for a specified timeout period. It is mainly used for network filesystems like NFS It can be configured using Autofs and the network filesystem can be soft mounted.

goyalratan

  • Sep 16th, 2006
 

in file system mounted with hard mount  option its try to mount the filesystem forever in soft mount option its try to mount filesystem few time and then give error  

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msrao

  • Oct 2nd, 2007
 

If a remote file system is hard mounted on a server, in some case the server is down,
While boot the server checks the hard mount of the remote file sytem the boot, if remote systm also down, at the particular junction server can not boot. To over this kind of problems soft mount of remote file systems developed.

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Petratch

  • Aug 24th, 2011
 

NFS supports two types of mounts -- hard mounts and soft mounts. If a mount is a hard mount, an NFS request affecting any part of the mounted resource is issued repeatedly until the request is satisfied (for example, the server crashes and comes back up at a later time). When a mount is a soft mount, an NFS request returns an error if it cannot be satisfied (for example, the server is down), then quits.

site:

http://uw714doc.sco.com/en/NET_nfs/nfsT.mount_cmd.html

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tdr

  • Feb 10th, 2016
 

Hard mounts can be, and very often are, used with autofs as well. To most users, there is virtually no difference between the two except that if "intr" is not added as a mount option with hard nfs mounts, it will literally retry reaching the nfs server forever, where soft mounts will time out and stop trying if the nfs server is not reachable.

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