[TriLUG] recommendations for mounting NTFS shares under Linux

[Mike McLean]

Geoffrey Douglas Purdy wrote:
> " Additionally, smbmount seems unable to handle the soft disconnects that
> NT typically performs after 15 minutes of inactivity: Walk away from a
> Linux system connected to an NT box for a while, and when you come back
> and try to access the NT share, you might get a broken-pipe message and be
> unable to unmount the share. So, you might want to unmount connections
> that will be inactive for any time at all."
> 
> So far I have not had any problems with "soft disconnects", but I've only
> connected for a short (~20 min.) time.  Has anyone else observed the
> problem described above?

I've seen this error, but I had attributed it to the very unstable win98
server I was mounting from.  Hmm... 

Anyway, I got around the problem by using autofs.  That way the
filesystem is only mounted when used, and unmounted after a certain
period of inactivity (less than 15 minutes I imagine).

You just have to add a line something like

foo	-fstype=smbfs,username=xx,password=xx,workgroup=xx	://winbox/foo

to /etc/auto.misc. Then just restart autofs and try 'ls /misc/foo'. 


Also keep in mind that this may be fixed in the more recent versions of
Samba, or there may be some sort of 'keepalive' directive that you can
turn on....