I have the following problem.
We have the partition /iAmAPartition mounted on ~100 client machines via NFS. i want to move the partition somewhere else (because it's a mess) and have the files recreated automatically (the application is taking care of that).
the problem is that some of the clients are using the exported data as input in scripts.
the actual question is .... what can i do in order to make this change without breaking something ? if i stop the nfs daemon, what will happen to the clients ? will they stall or not ?
What will happen when you stop NFS is complicated and depends on the way the NFS partition is mounted on their machines (what options were used to mount).
It would be foolish to attempt to do this during business hours and you should schedule an outage. This give you some breathing room if something does go down or wrong due to unforeseen circumstances.
Make sure you let the users at least know you are making changes that could cause an outage.