[plug] autofs compared to smbmount

[Ian Kent]

On Mon, 2 Aug 2004, Ryan wrote:

> On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 11:28, Trevor Phillips wrote:
> > autofs is a way of automatically mounting shares (be they SMB, nfs, or
> > local devices) upon demand. There's a bit of configuration to it, but
> > it means that instead of having to run mount (or smbmount), you can
> > just cd directly to a specially formatted path. eg;
> >    cd /auto/smb/foopc/share
> > 
> > autofs is great - but can be a pain to set up well. ^_^
> 
> Also a pain in another way ...
> 
> If I've been at work with my laptop and mounted up one of the main
> network drives (smbfs in this case) with autofs and saved attachments in
> Evolution to it, played the odd ogg with XMMS from it etc.  then I go
> home and try to do the same, naturally it will try to go directly to the
> autofs mount point from these respective applications and hang.  I have
> to kill the autofs process and it recovers gracefully, but it will hang
> indefinitely if I don't.

What version of autofs and mount?

> 
> Anyone know a fix - other than changing my mounting practises? :)

Well, I put some ping logic (for NFS mounts) into autofs v4 but got 
into trouble as some people block ICMP.

The other problem here is that autofs treats smb mounts as generic mounts. 
To include discovery logic would mean breaking it out into a seperate 
mount module. Then there's the question of "how to discover if the 
server is OK" with smb calls in a similar way to calling the RPC 
NFS null procedure.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Ian