Gluster users - Jul 2011 - auto or standard mount

So... we've been running our systems with standard fstab based mounts and
recently have experienced occasional issues where a system had lost
communication to one of the nodes it should be talking to.  Aside from when
a system is backing up its files, we don't do a lot of access on our
filesystems, usually its just hits here and there.

One thing we discussed this morning was the possibility of moving to
automounts to see if that would resolve the issues by always opening the
connection when its needed.

Do you guys have a strong preference one way or the other?  Can you think
of some some caveats I should be aware of?  Was there a specific way you
decide auto vs standard?

thanks

greg