> It at least doesn't lock anything up that has a file open when the network goes down.
I must admit I feel quite a bit of irrational fury when this happens (similarly, when DNS lookups hang). That some other computer is down should never prevent me from doing, closing, or killing anything on my computer. Make the system call return an error immediately! Remove the process from the process table! Do anything! I can power cycle the computer to get out of it, so clearly a hanging NFS server is not some kind of black hole in our universe from which no escape is possible.
> I must admit I feel quite a bit of irrational fury when this happens (similarly, when DNS lookups hang).
Neither of those reactions are in anyway irrational. In fact, they're not only perfectly reasonable and understandable but felt by a great many of us here on HN.
I must admit I feel quite a bit of irrational fury when this happens (similarly, when DNS lookups hang). That some other computer is down should never prevent me from doing, closing, or killing anything on my computer. Make the system call return an error immediately! Remove the process from the process table! Do anything! I can power cycle the computer to get out of it, so clearly a hanging NFS server is not some kind of black hole in our universe from which no escape is possible.