Bug 97743

Description of problem:

The process of mounting smb shares randomly hangs at random when using the ftsab
entry (as netfs does on bootup). This pretty much brings the boot-up process to
a grinding halt about 3/5ths of the time on a machine with two smb mounts.

Mounting completely manually (eg: mount //someserv/mountname -t smbfs -o
credentials=/home/joe/.smbid,uid=joe,rw /home/joe/mountpoint) does not cause the
random hangs, however mounting with the aid of an fstab entry (mount
/home/joe/samba) does hang randomly. Ctrl-C must be pressed to get the command
line back, but the share _is_ mounted in spite of the hang and there's no actual
indication of error.

Bug 13862 from three years ago looks very similar, only the hang during boot
occurs at "Mounting SMB filesystems"

There are five machines in total. These (and only these) were freshly installed
with RH9 and fully updated. All five are exhibiting this problem. The machines
previously ran RH 8, and did not have have this trouble. They were fully updated
until the wipe & install session today. The machines also vary in hardware and
function, so no imaging or kickstart scripts were used in any of the installs.  
(FYI: The server is a gentoo box, and no other workstation is having trouble
like this)

Unfortunately, this means that any machines with several shares are essentially
un-bootable without a rescue disk as they will hang almost every time when
running the netfs initscript. Netfs runs even before sshd, so we can't even ssh
into the boxes and kill hung mount processes.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
samba: 2.2.7a-8.9.0
mount: 2.11y-9
initscripts: 7.14-1

How reproducible:
Very. I've found that the likelyhood of a hang running netfs is over 50% on a
machine with two smb mounts.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Add several smb shares to fstab to be mounted on boot.
2. Reboot (or mount/umount the shares a few times using fstab's help).
3. Watch the mount process hang.
    
Actual results:

Mount hangs randomly while mounting fstab-aided smb shares.

Expected results:

No hangs one way or the other.

Additional info:

A messy and unpleasant workaround is to edit the netfs script and force it to
background the mounting tasks. It works, since even on a hang the filesystems do
get mounted- We just wind up with one or more mount processes sitting in the
process list until killed manually.