mounted machine down => df hangs

[Jeff Sullivan]

>When one of our disk servers goes down, doing a 'df' on a machine that has
>the one of the disk server's partitions mounted, causes the 'df' process
>to hang PERMANENTLY.

I think that the reason WHY this occurs has been well covered in recent
responses to this inquiry. However, no one (yet) has offered a fix or
workaround. Since this has happened to me several times in the past, I'll
offer this workaround:

alias df "(echo ' '; /bin/df \!*) &"

That puts df in the background, just in case it doesn't return for a while.

Jeff Sullivan           Computervision Division
CADDS R&D               Prime Computer, Inc.
                        Bedford, MA     01730

UUCP    : {decvax|linus|sun}!cvbnet!jsulliva
Internet: jsulliva at cvbnet.prime.com