samba - Dec 2000 - Remount question.

We currently use SAMBA as an interface to a DFS cell.
We have clients running linux, and they use the smb interface to access the
DFS cell.
The default timeout is 25 hours before the mount is no longer valid. As DFS
has a credentials expiration of 26. So we use that to prevent users from
running out of credentials first.

The problem is that the end user on linux is launching many programs from
the smb mount space.
When the mount times out, the user is forced to kill the apps with a lock
on the mount, umount the directory, and then remount with smbmount.

What we are looking for is either to emulate windows behavior to
reauthenticate/remount occasionally, or just have it so that we can do a
remount, without killing the applications running from that space.
Hopefully to have little impact once the mount is back up.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!



Jaime Fournier
IBM Global Services
T/L 793-6838
Internet: jafour1@us.ibm.com
Pager: 512-480-7026

On Thu, 7 Dec 2000, Jaime A Fournier wrote:
> The problem is that the end user on linux is launching many programs from
> the smb mount space.
> When the mount times out, the user is forced to kill the apps with a lock
> on the mount, umount the directory, and then remount with smbmount.
When smbfs detects that there is something wrong with the connection to
the server (for example that the server has disconnected) it is supposed
to reconnect. I can't say that I know that running programs from smbfs
when it reconnects works, but I think it should ...

When the server drops the connection you should get a message from the
kernel (syslog, dmesg) saying that it did something. The exact message may
vary but something like this:
        smb_trans2_request: result=-9, setting invalid 
        smb_retry: new pid=6783, generation=157 

What samba version and linux kernel version are you using? Some versions
have known problems with reconnecting, you should be using 2.0.7 and
2.2.18-pre25. If you get "smb_retry: caught signal" messages then you
are
using a bad version.

> What we are looking for is either to emulate windows behavior to
> reauthenticate/remount occasionally, or just have it so that we can do a
> remount, without killing the applications running from that space.
> Hopefully to have little impact once the mount is back up.
It would certainly be possible to add an ioctl or something to be able to
force a reconnect from some userspace program. But again, this should
happen automatically.

/Urban