disappearing shares.

[Frank Carreiro]

I have similar problems with RH 6.2 and 2.07.  I understand the problem 
is with smbfs which started as a "non-samba" product bundled into the 
linux kernel.  On the samba web site I noticed that Andrew Tridgell has 
taken over maintenance of smbfs

http://va.samba.org/samba/smbfs/

Sent him a couple of emails with my message log which shows several 
interesting error messages.  Haven't heard back from him yet.  I suspect 
this has something to do with the windoze 2k auto disconnect.  If a 
connection is idle for 15 minutes windoze disconnects the linux mount 
screwing linux up (basically the share disappears).  If you cd into the 
share and type "ls" you get an i/o error message for your troubles.  
Check out Micro$oft's side and read article ID: Q138365. 

You can try increasing the idle time (or disabling it) and see if that 
helps.  My NT admin is unwilling to disable the feature so I'm hopefully 
another solution will present itself.  My message logs show many retry's 
and the occasional fail message.  (I always grimace when I see that).  
You can always remount to a new mount point but that's a band aid and 
not a solution.  Rebooting fixes the problem for a bit.  Still not a 
good solution.

BTW, you mentioned a system has the share mounted for days.  By any 
chance is that share regularly used?  Is it mounting to a win2k box also?

I've also rewritten smbfs/proc.c increasing the timeout from 5 to 30 
seconds which "seems" to have helped a little (SMB_RETRY_INTR 
increased).  I suspect if the win2k server is VERY busy auto disconnect 
will still occur and trash your mount point.  Haven't had alot of time 
to investigate this further.  I noticed this issue has come up several 
times in the samba mail list archives.  Hopefully we can get some 
discussion going.  I can't believe there aren't that many people using 
smbfs.  It's a handy tool and I use it all the time :-)

Frank Carreiro
UNIX Systems Admin.
HS&A

> nning 2.2.0 on a RH 6.2 system.  My network consists on one Linux box
> and a bunch of W2K machines.  I can browse the Linux shares from the W2K
> boxes okay and can mount the W2K shares on the Linux box BUT
> 1.	When I execute the command to mount a W2K share, it takes about 5
> minutes for the command to complete (return to the prompt) AND
> 2.	With one exception, after the W2K shares are mounted, the W2K shares
> disappear after a few hours and the directory where a share was mounted is
> empty.  At that point, I have to re-mount the W2K shares.  There is one W2K
> share that does not disappear and seems to have been there for several days.
> 
> Any ideas where I can start?
> 
> -- 
> Byron G. Johnson
> Business Development Manager, Enterprise Security
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