samba - Jan 2004 - How to check the status of smbd process (timeuot question) ?

Hi,

I'm using samba 2.2.5 on Linux 386 with W2k as ADS.
At the time I check the status of smbd process on 
Fileserver from another server with 
"smbclient -A user_auth -L samba" :
it works fine until smbd stucks.

When I deliberately kill smbd process on server,
smbclient waits approximately 120 seconds before
it gives me following feedback:
"connection to samba failed".
There is a little problem, because I want 
to check fileserver's smbd process every 10 seconds.

What I need is an option in smbclient like
"-t <timeout>" or other smb client for 
non-interactive querying the fileserver from 
within bash with
an build-in option to kill the query and
set exitcode to != 0 after predefined deadline.

Ideas ?

Greetings, 
mpr.

-- 
Marcin Przyczyna
Net & Sys Admin,
citiworks AG
mpr@citiworks.de
+49 89 9925 75356