Preventing Bad SMB Mount From Stalling A Boot

[Dan Naumov]

>I mount my SMB shares from /etc/fstab on a FBSD 8.x production machine like
>this:
>
> //USER at WINSERVER/SHARE   /mountpoint    smbfs   rw          0       0
>
>The problem is that after an outage, "WINSERVER" doesn't come up
>before the FBSD machine. So, the FBSD machine tries to boot and then
>hangs permanently because it cannot get the SMB share points mounted.
>This recently happened after a catastrophic power outage that cooked
>the share info on "WINSERVER". Even after it came up, it was no longer
>serving the proper shares and the FBSD machine could never find the
>SMB shares and thus hung permanently.
>
>The SMB mounts are not essential for systems operations. Is there a
>way to tell the FBSD to try and mount SMB, but keep going and complete
>the boot if it cannot?

A bit of an ugly hack, but have you considered attempting to mount the
share via an automatic script after the system has finished booting?

- Sincerely,
Dan Naumov