Sticky shares?

[Michael P. Blinn]

> > I'm attempting to mount two NT4.0 shares to two local directories on my
> > samba server -- I want to do this so I can use Amanda to do backups of
both
> > my Linux and NT boxes. I run into two problems:
>
> What is wrong with smbtar, I though Amanda was preconfigured to use that.

It is. I'd rather use Amanda than scripting it myself w/ smbtar because of
the distributed nature of our network.. and my own laziness ;)

> > 1: When I do the mount command, I receive the error "Unable to load
cp437",
> > though the mount apparently succeedes -- I assume this is a codepage
that is
> > not enabled by default..?
>
> It is set as the value for the default codepage, but it is not compiled by
> default.  It's a smbfs bug, it should only look for it if you have
> specified both a codepage and an iocharset
> (American are you? Just ignore it, strange non us-ascii things ... :)

Super. Thank you.

> > 2: The mounted path eventually becomes unmounted, say if I leave it
> > overnight. My Linux box still thinks it is mounted, however, and backups
> > crap out without attempting a remount.
>
> Kernel version? smbmount from which samba version?
> It should try and be able to reconnect, but older versions have a few
> known problems (both with trying and being able).

Kernel 2.2.19
Samba 2.2.1a

> autofs is nice, another trick is to make a script update something on the
> share (date > /mnt/.smbfs_keepalive) every 5 minutes or so. SMB servers
> like to disconnect idle clients.
> (A horrible practise, as that closes their files and drops any file locks
>  they may have ... smbfs should ping the server itself, but currently
>  does not. I have patches for that though.)

Are your patches are basically a keepalive script like your date crontab
entry above, or are they source patches? Is there any known threshold for
the amount of time that goes by before these filesystems are "forgotten"?
Can I change this threshold value? - I'm enjoying SAMBA for helping me steer
waaay away from NFS and its inherent chattiness (And the $$ involved!).

Thank you Urban, et al.
  -Michael Blinn
    People Places, Inc.