NFS mounts - hard versus soft - info. wanted

[dave8 at anduin.cs.liverpool.ac.uk]

I'm sure this subject must have been raised previously, and I apologise
if it has been brought up very recently, but ... I am looking for
information regarding the advantages and drawbacks of hard versus soft
NFS mounts, in particular, on HP 9000 series machines runnning HP-UX 7.0.

Up to now, we have been using NFS hard mounts, mainly because of concern
that filestore security would be compromised by the use of soft mounts.

However, we are frustrated by situations where a cluster server goes down,
and the workstations on another cluster server hang because the PATH
environment variable on these includes a directory residing on a
partition being exported from the machine that has gone down. We are
considering using soft mounts with an increased value for "retrans".
Altering "retrans" to 8, would mean, I believe, that the machine will try
for about 0.7 * ( 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + .. 2^7 ) = 180 secs. to carry out the
mount before abandoning the attempt.

The relevant manuals do not seem to provide any guidelines on this.

Dave Sherratt. ....   dave8 at uk.ac.liv.cs.and