Disappearing Mounts

[Keith G. Murphy]

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.