OK, I wrote a shell script that should be user-friendly enough and should take care of every option. Copy/paste the code below into a text editor and save it as smartumount in your /usr/bin dir (as root) make sure it's executeable by using the command "chmod +x /usr/bin/smartumount"
First the script tries to umount the drive normally. It that fails, it tries to restart famd which is the most common problem. If that fails it tries to restart xinetd. If that fails it uses the command "fuser -ki <your-unmountable-drive>" which asks you if you want to kill each process that's using that folder. Be careful with this - you should know what each process is before you kill it. If that fails, probably because you didn't kill all the processes, it asks you if you want lazily unmount the volume, which removes the drive even though processes are still using it. I'm no expert, so let me know if I should make any improvements. Feel free to post this wherever you want.
USAGE:
smartumount folder-to-unmount
Example:
smartumount /mnt/ipod
Note: you might have to change the path to init.d for your distro. For example you might need to change every instence of "/etc/init.d" to "/etc/rc.d/init.d"
Code:
#!/bin/bash
if [ `whoami` != "root" ]; then
echo "You must run this as root"
exit
fi
dir=$1
# first try unmounting it without doing anything special
testumount=`umount $dir 2>&1`
if [ `echo $testumount | grep "not mounted" | wc -l` -gt 0 ]; then
echo "$dir isn't mounted, exiting"
exit
fi
if [ `echo $testumount | grep busy | wc -l` -gt 0 ]; then
echo "Having trouble, checking famd..."
else
echo "unmounted $dir without any trouble..."
exit
fi
# check famd
if [ `ps -e |grep famd|wc -l` -gt 0 ]; then
/etc/init.d/famd restart
# try unmounting again
if [ `umount $dir 2>&1 | wc -l` -gt 0 ]; then
echo "I tried restarting famd, but that didn't work. checking xinetd"
else
echo "Unmounted $dir by restarting famd"
exit
fi
else
echo "famd isn't running so it couldn't be that.."
fi
# check xinetd
if [ `ps -e | grep xinetd | wc -l` -gt 0 ]; then
/etc/init.d/xinetd stop
# try unmounting again
if [ `umount $dir 2>&1 | wc -l` -lt 1 ]; then
/etc/init.d/xinetd start
echo "Unmounted $dir by restarting xinetd"
exit
fi
/etc/init.d/xinetd start
echo "I tried stopping xinetd, but that didn't work."
else
echo "xinetd isn't running so it couldn't be that.."
fi
echo
echo "I'm going to list processes that are using the folder you are
trying to umount. Answer whether you'd like to kill them or not.
You should look up each process before you answer. Use the
following command in a separate shell:"
echo
echo " ps -e | grep <pid>"
echo
echo "where <pid> is the number of the process."
echo
fuser -ki $dir
echo
if [ `echo $testumount | grep busy | wc -l` -gt 0 ]; then
echo "OK, this is the last resort. Do you want to umount the volume using "
echo "the -l option? According to the umount man page -l means:"
echo
echo " Lazy unmount. Detach the filesystem from the filesystem
hierarchy now, and cleanup all references to the filesystem as
soon as it is not busy anymore. (Requires kernel 2.4.11 or later.)"
echo
echo "Use -l option? (y\n)"
read yn
if [ $yn == "y" ]; then
umount -l $dir
else
echo "OK. Sorry I couldn't help"
fi
else
echo "You're all good :)"
fi
exit
