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Date:      Wed, 30 May 2001 10:35:58 +0200
From:      Niek Bergboer <niek@bergboer.net>
To:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: smbfs: disconnected servers
Message-ID:  <20010530103558.A31220@wit379119.student.utwente.nl>
In-Reply-To: <20010528142059.A703@kirk.sector14.net>; from dgl@visi.com on Mon, May 28, 2001 at 02:20:59PM -0400
References:  <20010528142059.A703@kirk.sector14.net>

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Hi,

On Mon, May 28, 2001 at 02:20:59PM -0400, Doug Lee wrote:
> I just cvsuped to 4.3-STABLE (from 4.2-STABLE) and did make
> buildworld, make buildkernel, make installkernel, and make
> installworld.  During the buildkernel, I realized I wanted to make
> some changes to my kernel config file; so I did, then aborted and
> started over the buildkernel.  No errors.

Now that some changes to smbfs have been MFC'ed, there still is an
open issue concerning smbfs: I'm using FreeBSD (4.3-STABLE for that
matter) on a large campus network of over 2000 computers that are
personal systems of students themselves. If I use mount_smbfs to mount
a share on these systems, this works perfectly. 

However, the problems begin when somebody whose share I mounted
decides to switch off his computer: I (obviously) cannot read from the
mountpoint anymore, but there also is _no way_ of forcefully
unmounting the share anymore. 

One might say that this is logical since there is no way to
communicate a decent "logoff" packet to the (now switched off) server.
However, I'm left with a dead mountpoint that doesn't respond to
anyting anymore and cannot be unmounted.

How difficult (and desirable) would it be to implement either one of
the following two options in smbfs:

1. The ability to reconnect to a server: suppose a server switches
off, and switches on again the following day.
2. The ability to forcefully unmount the share on my local machine, to
such an extent that if the server cannot be contacten within a
specified amount of time, that the entry is bluntly deleted from the
kernel's internal list of mounted filesystems (or something along
those lines).

Any ideas (and yes, it might have been better to put this on -hackers,
but feel free to reply to -hackers).

Niek

-- 
Conscience doth make cowards of us all.
                -- Shakespeare

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