Samba Config

[Kevin Brown]

This was my experience with samba at my last job.  A shell script was setup to
automount a remote smbfs to the linux box (RH 6.x/7.x).  Another script was
written to unmount that filesystem during shutdown.  Instead the system hung
trying to shutdown and would have to be improperly turned off (push the power
button) and then have the joy of waiting for it to fsck 60GB of space.  The only
solution found from searching the web came from the samba mailing list which
stated that it was an issue with samba and that it was best to just manually
unmount those shares before shutting down.  This issue showed up with the
version coming with RH6.1 IIRC and was still there in RH7.2.

Wish I still had a pointer to that message.  I showed it to my coworkers at ASU
since they were the ones that asked me to research the problem.

Craig White wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2002-01-30 at 23:13, Kevin Brown wrote:
> > Samba is the SMB network file handler for *nix that does what Windows Network
> > Neighborhood/sharing is for.  When mounting a remote partition with it you
> > always specify that it is smbfs, not what it actually is because the remote box
> > is going to interpret your calls for you.
> >
> > This allows linux to mount remote NTFS partitions because linux isn't seeing it
> > as NTFS (for which it only has a very buggy read-only module), but as an smbfs
> > which samba and windows file sharing know how to deal with.
> >
> > on boxes that you want to remotely mount partitions FROM, you have to have
> > samba/"windows file sharing" running/enabled.  On the machines that will be
> > mounting remote systems you should only need the samba client tools.
> >
> > The easiest way to auto mount a remote file system on boot is NOT /etc/fstab,
> > but through a boot script, just like is used by other services.
> >
> > WARNING!! WARNING!! WARNING!!
> > do NOT issue a shutdown or reboot while a remote smbfs is MOUNTED on your
> > machine or it WILL HANG.  This is a long standing known issue with samba.
> > MANUALLY unmount the smbfs BEFORE you shutdown the machine.  This cannot be done
> > by a script, it must be done manually.
> >
> > END WARNING
> -------------
> I'm not gonna comment on the advice 'not' to add a remote smbfs mount to
> fstab, but I will state that I have such a setup now, have had that for
> several years and have never hung on shutdown/reboot. I don't know about
> long standing issue with samba...I have not had the problem thru many
> different versions of redhat (6.0/6.1/6.2/7.0/7.1/7.2) nor samba (I'm
> now at 2.2.1a but I have used many 2.0x versions).
> 
> Perhaps ignorance is bliss but I find remote smbfs quite suitable to
> automatically mount via fstab. Remote NFS mounts as auto mounts, that's
> another story...
> 
> Craig
> 
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