Last Updated on 2016-11-03.
[:en]If you use a Debian or Ubuntu client system to access a Windows Samba share (CIFS), this works quite easily, basically.
//nas/myshare /mnt/myshare cifs auto,_netdev,username=xx,password=yy,domain=zz 0 0
But what happens if the server is not always available?
I tested the behavior with Debian 7 Wheezy and it was a bit disappointing.
Example: If the SMB share is not available for a few seconds and Debian tries to access it, it stays in this “not available” state for 15 to 20 minutes. In this timespan, you get error messages like
ls: cannot access /mnt/myshare: No such device or address
One workaround might be a cronjob with commands like
umount -l /mnt/myshare && mount -a
but this can only be a solution if e.g. a few single files are copied from time to time.
I also tested mounting via AutoFS, but it takes about the same long time to reconnect as in my example above.
Hopefully, this behavior will be optimized in newer versions.[:]