If anyone has time to look at this problem I would appreciate it. I think I am looking for a way to increase the "timeout" in samba (in the smb.conf file) for reporting a "down" link or "can't read xyz file". However I am writing to you folks because this problem has come up while using rsync my problem ========= We have a wan in which links from a central linux machine to a nodes which are xp machines from 1 to 5 minutes a night. not very common, but it happens. we are using samba to mount directories on the remote linux machines to the local linux server. (we use samba because we also have xp machines in our network it is just easier to use this for now). We use rsync nightly to backup remote directories to the local linux server. When one of the outages happes during a backup (rsync operation) either - if I have not set the --timout value in rsync the operation just continues. Rysnc seems not to notice that samba is reporting errors and just copies over I assume a bunch of 0000. Of course the file is corrupted. - if I have set the --timeout value in rsync, in the case of failure rsync just drops out. Of course if i set the --timeout value to something like 2 minutes rsync seems to ignore the samba errors and continues. What I would like to do is set a timeout value in samba for reporting errors from what seems to be about 30 seconds to something like 6 minutes. Then I could set the --timeout value in rsync to something like 5 minutes. I can't find in man smb.conf anywhere were you can set something like "if you can't connect in 30 seconds" then report an error. Perhaps I should be using an rysnc server or some other method. Any help would be appreciated. _________________________________________________________________ Gift-shop online from the comfort of home at MSN Shopping! No crowds, free parking. http://shopping.msn.com