System issues resulting from disconnected SMB shares

Jan 22, '03 10:11:41AM

Contributed by: robg

I recently built myself a Redhat box (see this thread on the forum site) to take the development site serving workload off of my G4. I mount the Redhat's web server directory via SMB, so I can edit and test locally on my Mac with jEdit. Last night, I shut down the Redhat box without disconnecting the SMB share first. Bad bad move.

I had left jEdit running; it went spinning beach ball nearly immediately. So did the Finder. The terminal was open, so I headed there to try to see what was happening. I was pretty sure it would time out eventually, but I wasn't sure how long that would take. In the terminal, after typing cd /Volumes to see what was there, a simple ls crashed the Terminal.

A few minutes later, things tried to return to normal, but the Finder was still locked up, and even quitting and restarting it via the Terminal had no effect. Then the dock died. I finally wound up rebooting. I had a similar experience at work when I shut down my shared Windows machine before disconnecting the share on my iBook; you'd think I would've learned by now!

So if you're working with SMB shares (and perhaps other server types as well, I expect), be sure to disconnect them before shutting down the server! Also, if anyone has any workarounds to return the box to working order in a more timely manner (until Apple can hopefully fix this issue!), please post them here.

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