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Marc Chamberlin wrote:
Hello - I could use some advise on how to configure our SuSE systems to work in a dynamic network. I have several computers running SuSE and use fstab to do a number of automounts of file systems that exist on other computers within our network. Trouble is that these other computers may come and go and I do not have control over the exact configuration of the network at any given time. So, what you'd like is a mounting solution similar to a WINS-based system?
I use fstab to define what I want automounted, so as to be able to run some scripts that access available remote file systems during boot up. (That is one reason why I cannot use the KNetworkManager as it is not active until after boot up has taken place and a second is that these scripts must be ran during the boot up process so as to set up some other server configurations automatically and not wait until a user has logged in.)
Trouble is two fold. during boot up, if the automount process finds one computer that does not exist, it times out and seems to give up on mounting any of the rest of the computers in the list. I would like to get around this without having to endure a long timeout for each failed mount attempt also so that the boot up process can be accomplished in a reasonable amount of time. And, after bootup, this timeout problem also seems to plague the SuSE menu (in the kicker bar, i.e. the menus displayed when one clicks on the SuSE logo) When I click on the SuSE menu launcher, it seems to want to do an automount of all the file systems defined in the fstab file and this can result in a horrendously long time out process (for each failed attempt to automount a remote file system) during which the entire kicker becomes unresponsive and frozen.
I probably am overlooking some simple configuration setting but so far have not been able to find a method of getting around these two issues. Any help and suggestions would be much appreciated! (Am mostly running SuSE 11.1 with KDE 3.5) It seems like the problem is with your network admins. I've read over your message several times during the past week and cannot understand quite what you expect.
Basically, if you have dependencies on other machines to run scripts, those machines should have static addresses and be "always on" for your systems to access. Thinking back over the years in my experiences with Novell 3.x/4.x systems, Windows NT systems, OS/2 systems and Linux-based systems they all require the remote computer/server to be available at the time it is requested or it goes into some sort of wait state until a timeout is achieved. Since it appears your network staff are reluctant to provide stable computers, then maybe you can run these scrips at a periodic basis instead of rebooting your computers? -- kai www.perfectreign.com | www.ecmplace.com www.twitter.com/PerfectReign -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org