Disappearing Mounts

Keith G. Murphy keithmur at mindspring.com
Thu Jan 4 17:23:16 GMT 2001


Winston Nchamukong wrote:
> 
> Dear Admin,

I don't think there's anyone called 'Admin' here.  Welcome to anarchy. 
;-)
> 
> I wish to report a problem that I have been experiencing with Samba versions
> 2.0.6 and 2.7. The specific problem concerns mounting windows shares on our
> Linux machines running Linux 6.2. 

There's really no such thing.  RedHat 6.2 by any chance?  There's a
MacMillan product with similar numbering as well.

> These shares are mounted using the mount
> -t smbfs command. These shares keep on disappearing ( i.e. they time out)
> 
There definitely is a bug in smbmount that relates to dying mounts.  I
found a patch on DejaNews, but can't remember now who posted it.  To
apply it, I had to modify /usr/src/linux/proc.c and rebuild the kernel. 
I hope someone else has a more definitive answer as to when this might
be incorporated in smbfs, or even as to where this patch originated.  I
believe there was a little more code to the patch I saw, but for
whatever reason I judged it unecessary in my case.

Here's an excerpt from my proc.c:

        /*
         * Wait for the new connection.
         */
    // KGM 10/6/2000
    // Here I applied some code that I saw on DejaNews to get rid of
    // my problems with a mount process dying.  The following commented
code
    // is the original.
    //interruptible_sleep_on_timeout(&server->wait,  5*HZ);
        //if (signal_pending(current))
        //      printk("smb_retry: caught signal\n")
    printk("smb_retry: Doing sleep_on_timeout due to patch\n");
    sleep_on_timeout(&server->wait, 5*HZ);

(To be ticky about it, that probably should be:

	#ifdef SMBFS_DEBUG_VERBOSE
	printk("smb_retry: Doing sleep_on_timeout due to patch\n");
	#endif

since the sleep_on_timeout is a common, normal thing and otherwise
you'll see a lot of those in your logs.)

If you're seeing that 'smb_retry: caught signal' in your logs, this is
most certainly the problem you're suffering from.

Things are working dandy for me since I applied it.  

I have to think a lot of folks don't leave Windows shares mounted very
long, or more would be seeing this problem.  Then there are the many who
don't use smbfs at all.




More information about the samba mailing list