Hello

i have a linux server with several SAMBA/CIFS shares. It is sometimes powered on but not always.
From my client computers, i need to mount these shares at the following conditions:

* mount them WHEN the server becomes available, which is not necessarily at the clients' boot time.
* when the server is not available, the system now becomes slow when listing/accessing files on the file system, for example in GNOME's nautilus, displaying files in the same directory as where the mount poiints are takes ages
* i am not running systemd, so i'm looking for a general linux solution (Slackware clients)

I'd like to know if there are suitable fstab options, or i have to use some automounter?

thx

There's no GNOME's Nautilus in Slackware.
Other than that, you're looking for a script that'll check if the server is up and then mount the relevant directories, or run on a timer via cron.
This is outside of fstab scope though, what would probably work is some simple bash coupled with mount & ping or some other way of checking if/when the server is up.
Maybe there's also some specialized software for this purpose, but I'm currently not aware of anything like that, not being a nfs user and all..

probably autofs would be a better choice.

1 members found this post helpful.

I second elcore's advice. Using autofs would allow mounting on demand (just in time), but remote shares won't be mounted prior to that, which reads like what the OP is hoping for.