Force dismount NFS partitions?

[Dan Watts]

In article <90Oct16.234936edt.1354 at smoke.cs.toronto.edu> moraes at cs.toronto.edu (Mark Moraes) writes:
>marinell at Iris1.UCIS.Dal.Ca (Kevin Marinelli) writes:
>>    If you set up the NFS mounted partitions to be "soft" mounted,
>> ... stuff deleted ...
>Since reads and writes on soft-mounted partitions can fail if the
>server is loaded or confused, this can cause programs that don't check
>system call return values to blithely keep going, creating trashed
>files.  There's a large number of such programs.  Mounting rw
>partitions soft is not a good idea if you value files in those
>partitions.

I agree.  Luckily for me, I mount these systems mainly for read-only
purposes and do writes infrequently.  What NFS really needs is some
way to mount the remote partitions hard but be able to force a dismount
in the event of failure.  I presume (perhaps wrongly) that if I had a
SCSI drive totaly flake out and stop responding, I'd be able to umount
it and go on.  Never had the need to try this theory out.  Anyone know
if it would work?

How about SGI?  What about a 'umount -f <dir>' to force dismount??
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