Force unmount nfs share freebsd stale shares

November 4, 2010

If the processes which are currently using this partition does not respond to “kill -9” command then you WILL have to have the MOUNTED partition available anyways before killing the process. So here is a work-around of this situation.

1. Create a virtual interface on the problem server which has the IP address same as the mounted server (which has gone down).

Lets say my mounted server is having an IP 192.168.1.3 and my server which is having the mounted partition is 192.168.1.4.

Now to kill the hunged processes in 192.168.1.4, we will have to bring the server (192.168.1.3) up inspite of the fact that it is actually down ;). So create a new virtual interface on ethernet card of 192.168.1.4.

ifconfig eth0:1 192.168.1.3 netmask 255.255.252.0

Now what we have done here is we have brought the remote server IP up ;).

Now you can kill the processes and unmount the file system.

After finishing up, remember to bring down the interface.

ifconfig eth0:1 down

Thats it!! Why this works is because of the simple reason that the mount and unmount commands always take into account the IP address which mounting/unmounting rather then the hostname. So this will always work out for you.