I have a separate fileserver box that provides a Samba share of some generic stuff I mount to my local box as /public. If that fileserver box goes down (it doens't crash, it is cleanly shutdown when not needed for long periods), then the Samba share remains mounted on my local system and if I bring up Thunar to browse files, it hangs because of the missing Samba share. I'm not trying to look for files on that missing share, only on my local system, but Thunar still hangs. The fix is to kill Thunar, manually unmount the Samba share, and try Thunar again.

It seems like there should be an fstab entry that could handle this automatically. Something like "errors=unmount", but I don't see that documented (but I haven't tried it to see if that syntax actually works anyway). Is there an approved way for doing this?

Here is my current fstab entry:

Hi there,

well, you're listing your share in the global /etc/fstab, which means it is supposed to be there. Always. Period. For all I know, there is no way to mount file systems "only if" when they're in fstab.

On the other hand, what you describe is a misbehavior of Thunar for me. Once you display the root directory / in Thunar, it tries to scan all top-level directories to display the number of items in them in the "size" column. IIRC, this can be disabled (haven't used Thunar/xfce for years, so I'm not sure), which might be a workaround for you. However, Thunar shouldn't hang permanently in that case; instead, it's supposed to stall for a moment and then continue gracefully after a timeout of a few seconds, ignoring the directory that made trouble.

You might also consider using autofs instead of static mounting. Then autofs could make sure that the share is always displayed, but mounted only if you access it (and, optionally, unmounted automatically after some time when you don't). I'm doing it like that across all my machines, most of which aren't permanently on.

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