Using PFS to Access CDROMs

The use of Portable File System (PFS) to provide access to multivendor CDROMs is increasing, particularly as 3rd parties often recommend use of PFS to allow access to their particular format CD (RockRidge, IS09660 and so on).

PFS mounts made with the default mount configurations can hang ASU, as PFS will retry a failed file system request indefinitely without indicating there is a problem. Using PFS with "soft" mounted file systems resolves this by having PFS report an error back to ASU allowing it to proceed with other activity.

The following example shows how you might use the "pfs_mount" program with the AS/U server. It assumes that the pfs mount daemons and RPC server have already been started:

pfs_mount -x unix -t iso9660 -o ro,soft /dev/dsk/c0t4d0 /cdrom

	CAUTION: It is important to use the 'soft' mount option in this command. The default setting specifies a 'hard' mount and can result in hangs of lmx.srv processes, if there are failures of the PFS mount being used as an AS/U share. Refer to the description in Chapter 5, section "Using NFS Mounted Resources with Advanced Server/9000" for more details.