Re: [webmin-l] Samba question - keeping the mount mounted

[Kris D. <kd...@vi...>]

Steve Campbell wrote:
> I have looked through as much Samba literature as I can find, but cannot 
> seem to find out why a mount that I have created using webmin from a RH EL 3 
> box to a Buffalo Terrabyte NAS server does not stay mounted.

Mmmh.  Strictly speaking, it stays mounted, but goes dormant or
disconnected.

This SHOULD, IIRC, be entirely hidden from userland.  I see similar
behaviour on a W2K box mounting a number of Samba shares;  after an
indefinite amount of idle time, Windows considers the share inactive in
some way, and shows its icon in My Computer with a red X over it.

I'm not sure it's *possible* to disable the "properly" (AKA stop the
client and/or server from dropping garbage into userland, or considering
a share "disconnected" when it hasn't been explicitly removed), but...

> I realize this is OT for this list, but hope someone has run into this 
> before. I can usually use a command before running the apps in a shell file, 
> and it only needs to be something as simple as 'df' to wake it up, but on 
> long running jobs, such as backups that create temp files before writing, it 
> may go back to sleep before it can be re-awakened.

Find out how long it takes for the mount to go to sleep.  Add a cron job
to touch a file or run ls (or something that accesses content on the
mount) set to run at a shorter interval than the sleep time.

NFS is fractionally more stable in this kind of arrangement;  you might
also want to see if you can use NFS instead of CIFS/SMB.

-kgd