Is there a good way to detect a stale NFS mount

Question

I have a procedure I want to initiate only if several tests complete successfully.

One test I need is that all of my NFS mounts are alive and well.

Can I do

Answer 1

Took me some time, but here is what I found which works in Python:

import signal, os, subprocess
class Alarm(Exception):
    pass
    
def alarm_handler(signum, frame):
    raise Alarm

pathToNFSMount = '/mnt/server1/' # or you can implement some function 
                                 # to find all the mounts...

signal.signal(signal.SIGALRM, alarm_handler)
signal.alarm(3)  # 3 seconds
try:
    proc = subprocess.call('stat '+pathToNFSMount, shell=True, stderr=subprocess.PIPE, stdout=subprocess.PIPE) 
    stdoutdata, stderrdata = proc.communicate()
    signal.alarm(0)  # reset the alarm
except Alarm:
    print "Oops, taking too long!"

Remarks:

1. credit to the answer here.

2. You could also use alternative scheme:

   os.fork() and os.stat()

check if the fork finished, if it has timed out you can kill it. You will need to work with time.time() and so on.