NFS

I'm not sure if this is  annoyance is a  Linux  issue of just NFS
but it can be annoying.  I'm no expert so maybe it's pilot error.

At home I have Mandrake 7.2 on a machine used as a file server
for a couple of other Linux boxes and a Mac OSX box.

Annoyance #1
User numbers must match on both the server and client
before files can be accessed.  User names don't count.
User numbers are automatically assigned when users
are created so will not ever match on the server and client
unless manual editing is performed.  Several years
ago I attempted to create a map_static file that
was supposed to map client user numbers to server
user numbers but it didn't work at all.

Annoyance #2
Sometimes the NFS server will go down.  All client machines
will freeze up. They cannot even be rebooted.  The GUI freezes.
Both Linux and the OSX clients do this.  There seems to be no timeout.

The Server cannot be cleanly rebooted because the shutdown
sequence attempts to shut down NFS before unmounting the
local hard drives and fails.  It never times out.  The reset button
must be pushed and hope the file system doesn't develop any
hard errors.  Amazingly, if the NFS server does come back up
after reboot the clients will un-lock and continue to work normally.

Is there a reason NFS volumes are unmounted before local
hard drives during shutdown?  I've had to hit RESET quite
a few times due to Linux hanging forever on stoping NFS
service and failing.

Dale