I'm looking for some way to mount nfs belatedly, only when it is being accessed. The ideal solution would be if I could add an entry to fstab for the remote nfs drive, but only attempt to mount that drive when it is being accessed.
Basically, I don't know when the remote computer will be on, except I do know that if my program is trying to access it, it will be on and accessible. Is there a good way to do this in configuration so I don't need to call a script from my program?
Both machines are running Debian Linux. The nfs server is Wheezy and the client is Sarge.
You can use automount for this. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Autofs
The example there shows how to automount an NFS share.