Preventing Bad SMB Mount From Stalling A Boot

[Brandon Gooch]

On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 8:51 AM, Rob <listone at deathbeforedecaf.net> wrote:
> 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.

Wow. Thanks for the link. I really AM a newb when it comes down to it,
I didn't even know this was possible with amd(8).

Add to the reading list `info am-utils`...

Perhaps the information at the link:

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

could someday be added to the handbook under "29.3.5 Automatic Mounts with amd":

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/book.html#NETWORK-AMD

At least in the future these two links will be in the same place for
another user's benefit :)

-Brandon