[Samba] samba and automount

[Tim Allen]

On Sat, 16 Nov 2002, Trey Nolen wrote:

> I'm running Samba with automount to automatically mount CDs in a server.
> These CDs need to be changed periodically, so I wanted to use automount so
> that they could be changed by the users fairly easily.  We use logon scripts
> to map the CDs to drive letters when users logon.  Unfortunately, it seems
> that having a drive mapped is treated like the drive is being used, so as
> long as there is someone logged into the system, automount will not unmount
> the drive.  The only way we can change the CDs is to have everyone log out,
> wait for the timeout (or unmount it manually), change the CDs and have
> everyone log back in.  Does anyone have a better way (one that will work)?

The only way I've found around this is to add

deadtime = 1

to the [global] section of smb.conf. This drops connections after a
minute. Then there's the automount timeout to add to this. The downside is
that all connections to the server are broken, so users see red crosses
against all their timed-out mapped drives when browsing. There's probably
a performance hit in having to re-establish connections as well, so I put
our automounted drives on a separate server.

Tim Allen