Hi, I have the following 2 problems about NFS and SAMBA service in my OpenSuse 10.2:

1) I have one solaris 10 X86 as the NIS server; one open suse 9.3, one redhat 4 AS as file servers in my home. Then I have 2-3 clients with Open suse 10.2. In each client, I create several nfs mounting in /etc/fstab file like this:

hostname:/sharename /localname nfs defaults 0 0

It works fine if everything is fine. But here is the problem:
If one of the file server (or both) is power off, then the client will have the problem to reboot. What I mean is that when the file servers are NOT available (off for example), if I reboot the client, the boot process will hang during the NFS mounting. In the console screen, it keeps showing like 'Importing NFS file .....' (Something like that). I know it is because one NFS file server is down. But the problem is that some client machine which I have, has no monitor or keyboard attached to it normally. I always connect to them through SSH. But ssh is active after the NFS mount. So if the machine is hanging like this, there is no way I can do anything. The only solution is that I attach monitor and keyboard to the client machine, then press some key (like 'ESC' or F1 or Ctrl-C, I really not sure which one works), then the booting process will give up this NFS mounting and go on.
All my client machine is suse 10.2. I don't have this kind of problem in suse 9.x. The booting process SHOULD time out after sometime, which will be fine for me. I can always remount it manually when the file server is available. This is pretty pain for me since I have to always try to find a keyboard and monitor in case like this.
Maybe someone here will suggest me to remove the NFS mount in my clients from /etc/fstab file. But the beauty of Linux is flexible and convenient. What I should configure to make Open suse 10.2 automatically time out NFS mounting the /etc/fstab file? I waited almost 20 minutes, it is still not time out until I press some key.

2) Another problem is about samba share on suse 10.2
All the users' home directory is on my Sun 10 x86 machine and auto mounted to all the clients through NIS and NFS. Two SUSE linux machines with 10.2 and 9.3 share the user home folder out through samba. (They both share the same folder out since /home eventually is mount to solaris /export/home). Here is the problem with the SUSE 10.2 (which is AMD 64 bit of Open suse 10.2). If I mapping the folder from my Windows XP laptop to the SUSE 10.2 AMD 64 bit samba share, first it maps successfully. I can manually create new files, delete files. I am pretty know how to do this in samba. But when I try to copy and paster file ( Highlight some files in windows, then CTRL-C, then go to Linux share folder, then CTRL-V), I got an error something like This operation can't be done because another process is locking the file. I don't remember the exactly message, but it is close the the real message. This means that I can create new file in linux samba share from windows, but I can't copy files from windows to it. I want to blame Microsoft, it must be some hotfixs or SP changing the sambe protocol. Or can I? If I mapping to the Suse 9.3 machine, everything works fine. Both machine have the exactly same samba config files, even samba username and password are the same.

I want to upgrade all my suse to 10.2, but because of this, I have to leave one as 9.3. Because samba is very important in my home.

Any help? Anything I can do to fix them? If I have to wait and try my luck in Suse 10.3, then please, Novell, make it work in SUSE 10.3.

Thanks

Read the manpage for mount. There are some options to soft mount the directory in case the server is down, and to delay mounting the directory until the network is up.

Also use cifs when mounting a samba share. It supports unix permissions better.

I don't know how cosher it is to share an NFS share of an smb mount of a third computer. Why not share the smb directory directly.

Mmm...
Firewall ?

Java, sorry to break the news but this problem still exists in SuSE 10.3! If the NFS connection is broken, then the computer is unable to reboot because it hangs waiting for the NFS server to come back. I am using the following options in /etc/fstab: auto,rw,hard,intr. It is really annoying!

You might want to try the soft option instead of intr. Another thing to try is _netdev if this is a case where the share is up but you want to ensure that the mount isn't tried until after the network is ready. I don't know if this would cause the mounting to be deferred indefinitely if the server is down, which is what you may want. By the way, there is an "NFS" manpage as well which details all of the options.

But all my other servers running Ubuntu and CentOS don't have this NFS problem, even when they are still writing to the NFS server and rebooting. It's only OpenSuSE 10.3 that is doing something funky. I am 99% loving OpenSuSE 10.3, but this NFS hanging and not mounting during bootup is really making me think twice about using this as a real working server.