A few minutes after I use smbmount to mount on my Linux machine a SMB share on a Windows NT server, it times out. Any subsequent attempts of accessing it result in a "Input/output error" message. Also, smbumount doesn't work, and I have to umount it as root.
The samba package in 6.2 should help solve the timeout problem.
I already have installed samba 2.0.6-9 and kernel 2.2.14-12, which are the ones in RedHat 6.2, but the samba mount timeout problem persists.
I added the following line to /etc/rc.d/rc.local, and the problem was solved: while : ; do { df --sync --type=smbfs >/dev/null; sleep 123; }; done &
This *should* be fixed better in 2.0.7-24.
The fix in 2.0.7-24 is not enough, it is not the only cause. There is a signal related bug in smbfs in < 2.2.18 that commonly kill mounts with a "smb_retry: signal failed, error=-3" message in the kernel log. 2.2.18 or 2.4.0 should improve on that, but there is still an issue with SIGSTOP/SIGKILL. Running strace/gdb on multithreaded programs accessing smbfs will not work well. The fix includes temporarily blocking those signals but also make sure you don't sleep while blocking them. (Hmm, maybe I should post it as a bug and let you keep track of my bugs for me ... :) Keeping smbmount alive have been the #1 problem in smbfs, judging from the samba mailinglist. I would not be surprised to see it come back. Bugs# 17820, 19623 appear to be duplicates of this. /Urban
*** Bug 17820 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***