samba - Aug 2004 - smbmount hangs Linux if Windows server goes down

Hello.

My linux box mounts a Windows filesystem as an smbfs entry in /etc/fstab.  I 
found that, if the hosting Windows box goes down for some reason (Imagine 
that!), any process on the Linux box that was accessing it hangs forever in 
state D and cannot be killed.

How can I configure smbmount so that it will timeout and return errors rather 
than hang forever?  I have scoured the web for answers, and see some for NFS, 
but not for SMBFS.

This is a serious problem because my Linux box also runs a Samba server.  
Sometimes a Windows box is accessing a directory on the Samba server that is 
actually symlinked to a directory hosted via smbfs on another Windows box.  If 
something happens to it, then the smbd server gets hosed and starts 
indefinetly spawning children until I reboot the Linux box, which I cannot do 
remotely because the shutdown gets hung trying to unmount the smbfs! What a 
mess!!!

Please, can anyone help?

What distro are you using? Samba version details?  

Hmm, I can see that it would indeed cause you a mess - especially with
the symlinking. Whilst I can't give you an answer to your question I
can ask for a few more details regarding the version numbers of your
linux machine.  Hopefully some other samba god will be able to help
you.

Anyhow all I can offer is to try and manually unmount the share when
your on the linux box and you know the windows box is down.
Sometimes if umount doesn't work, you can try:
umount -f