hard or soft — Specifies whether the program using a file via an NFS connection should stop and wait (hard) for the server to come back online, if the host serving the exported file system is unavailable, or if it should report an error (soft).

If hard is specified, the user cannot terminate the process waiting for the NFS communication to resume unless the intr option is also specified.

If soft is specified, the user can set an additional timeo=<value> option, where <value> specifies the number of seconds to pass before the error is reported.

intr — Allows NFS requests to be interrupted if the server goes down or cannot be reached.