Reconnect Attempts for CIFS share

Question

I have a CIFS share mounted in the FSTAB on Ubuntu server, which connects to our NAS and works without issue. Last night we had an issue with the SAN for about 12 hours. We corrected the problem and the Windows boxes restored their mappings. The Ubuntu box did not, but we were able to restore with mount -a.

I saw options to specify retries in man for NFS but not CIFS. Any ideas on ensuring a reconnect if the NAS goes down again?

Solution

The hard mount option is (similiar to NFS) avoiding to return errors to the clients when servers are unresponsive. (Default seems to be the soft option). Add this to your /etc/fstab and remount it (or reboot).

See the man page: http://linux.die.net/man/8/mount.cifs

Comments

[Zitrax]

How will that help with retry/reconnect ?

[Aaron Hudon]

It will retry forever.

[JeffRSon]

Does it? I see no change whether "hard" or "soft" is used or left out at all. Any experience with this?

[Aaron Hudon]

No, I only have experience with NFS where hard is honored. It is defined to retry forever but I dont know if it does.