Let’s learn more about setting up retry in fstab with NFS mount. As part of our Server Management Service, Bobcares provides answers to all of your questions.

How to Set up Retry in FSTAB in NFS Mount

The /etc/fstab file specifies the mounting of filesystems in Linux environments. Retrying becomes important while configuring Network File System (NFS) mounts in /etc/fstab. We can use the retry mount option if we have NFS mounts in the /etc/fstab and we would like to set up retry options for mounting in the event that something goes wrong. When working with network-based file systems, where there may be periodic connectivity problems, this option is quite helpful.

In the event of a temporary failure, we can configure how many times the NFS client should try to reconnect to the server using the retry option. Network problems or the NFS server’s brief unavailability are examples of transient failures. The usual syntax for an NFS entry with the retry option in the /etc/fstab file is as follows:

Each term is as follows:

1. server:/remote/export: Remote NFS server and export path.

2. /local/mount/point: Local directory where the remote file system will be mounted.

3. nfs: File system type.

4. options: A Placeholder for various mount options, including the retry option.

5. 0 0: The dump and pass options, and they are usually 0 for NFS mounts.

We can change the entry in the following way to include the retry option:

Here, retry=number_of_retries specifies the number of times the mount operation should be retried and time_between_retries shows the time (in seconds) to wait between each retry attempt.

We can manually remount the file system using the mount -a command or reboot the system to let the modifications take effect after making changes to the /etc/fstab file.

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Conclusion

We can offer some resilience to temporary network problems by configuring the retry option, which makes sure that the NFS client tries to reconnect to the server a predetermined number of times before giving up. We must select the value to our own network requirements and conditions.