I am using an Ubuntu 10.04 desktop in a Windows network to backup the windows shares from different machines. Shares are not always on.
For this purpose I am using this tutorial, http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=637258 since the past number of years. Till now it was working okay. Only the active shares are mounted automatically and then backed up using RSync commands in Cron. A problem only occurred if there was a power failure. In this case when the Ubuntu computer was restarted, the mount point was still available but with 0 items. In this case when the backup ran, everything inside was deleted. The workaround to this was to run the automount restart command before backup and then only the active shares were mounted.

Now suddenly the automount command itself is creating 0 items mount points for shares which are not active. This has happened since last few days/weeks. Something must have been updated due to which this error may be coming, I am not sure. I hope someone can help me sort out this issue.