[TriLUG] recommendations for mounting NTFS shares under Linux

[Geoffrey Douglas Purdy]

Following up on my last post, I have run into the "soft disconnect"
problem in a number of instances.  On several of the Linux servers, the connection
to the W2K share would be dropped after a short period of inactivity (~20
min.).  I think this may be an artefact of how those particular boxes
are connected to the main network.

As Mike suggested, autofs seems to be the solution.  I 've set the
timeout in /etc/auto.master to 5 min to be sure the directory is unmounted
by the linux box before the connection is dropped by the W2K server.

The following "Using automount and Samba" page was a helpful addition to
the sparse autofs man page:
http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/automount.htm

Thanks again for your suggestions,
Geoff


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike McLean [mailto:mamclean at eos.ncsu.edu]
> Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2001 12:22 PM
> To: trilug at trilug.org
> Subject: Re: [TriLUG] recommendations for mounting NTFS shares under
> Linux
>
>
> 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....
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