Force dismount NFS partitions?

[Kevin Marinelli]

In article <870 at ki.UUCP> dwatts at ki.UUCP (Dan Watts) writes:
>Does anyone know of a way to force dismount of an NFS mounted partition?
>I've got some partitions mounted from a remote Sun which is now down.
>Unfortunately, now I can't do a 'df'.  It just hangs waiting for the
>missing NFS mounts.  If I run 'umount', it hangs too.  It eventually
>comes back with an error that the umount timed out, but does't remove
>the mount entries.
>
>I'm looking for anything that'll work, even pointers to how I could
>write a program to manually muck with system files if that would get
>the #?$%@! partitions dismounted.
>-- 
    If you set up the NFS mounted partitions to be "soft" mounted,
the system will not hang when host server goes away.
everything will continue to work, although  any access to the partition via
df will report that it cannot be accessed. Otherwise, the partition will look
like an empty subdirectory when it is not mounted.

Kevin Marinelli
Academic Computing Services
Dalhousie University