umounting problems

[Carolyn Wasikowski]

Is there any way to tell NFS to umount a partition, and umount it NOW?

My problem is this:  one group at my site insists on having its /usr and
/usr/local partitions mounted as /n/bat/usr and /n/bat/usr/local on all
the Suns at our site.  When bat unexpectedly crashed due to a power
shortage last week, I naturally tried to umount all of bat's partitions
mounted on my systems.  Unfortunately, since /n/bat/usr was unreachable,
/n/bat/usr/local couldn't be umounted.  And since /n/bat/usr/local was
mounted, /n/bat/usr couldn't be umounted.

This simple way out of this vicious circle would be never to mount an NFS
partition upon another NFS partition.  Still, the larger question remains:
is there any way to force NFS to umount from a machine that is down?

jc at lle.rochester.edu  -or-  {allegra|seismo}!rochester!ur-laser!jc
image analysis lab sys admin, lab for laser energetics, u of r, ny