[Samba] Samba share and --ghost'ed automount hierarchy

[Robert Giles]

Howdy folks - I have an automount hierarchy "/data", with 30 or so mounts 
defined across various hosts on my network.  A few of these mountpoints 
are temporarily off-line, but still appear under /data, due to the --ghost 
option.

When I try to access the top level \\server\data from a Windows client, 
the directory listing in Explorer never returns because smbd is trying to 
stat these unavailable filesystems it thinks exist due to the --ghost 
option.

Is it possible to have smbd simply return the list of directories it finds 
(from the "fake" --ghost listing) without it causing the automounter to 
attempt a mount each directory?

I'm running SuSE 10.1, with Samba 3.0.22-11-SUSE-CODE10 and autofs 4.1.4 
on a 2.6.18-rc4 kernel (with SuSE 10.1 /proc/config.gz).  "auto.master" 
and the "auto.data" maps are stored in LDAP, if that makes a difference.

(another option might be to write a script to convert the auto.data map 
into an appropriate set of symbolic links to msdfs filesystems, install 
Samba on the various NFS servers, etc.  - but I'd like to try the easy 
option first - currently, none of the servers in auto.data provide SMB 
services).

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Robert Giles                     Group System Administrator
SPD/ARL:UT              (512) 835-3077 · Fax (512) 490-4244