Preventing Bad SMB Mount From Stalling A Boot

[Rob]

On 07/04/2010, at 1:14 AM, Tim Daneliuk wrote:

> 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?

In an NFS environment, amd(8) is used to mount shares on demand instead of on 
boot. It doesn't directly support SMB, but it may be possible to to combine 
them:

  http://www.jiegao.co.cc/computer-notes/unix-tips/freebsd-amd-for-samba

Rob.