[UFO Chicago] network not ready when fstab is processed

[Politik Durden]

 > Message: 4
> Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:59:25 -0700 (PDT)
> From: "Matthew T. Gibbs" <mtgibbs at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [UFO Chicago] [DLC]allowable characters for
> group names
>     on    Xubuntu
> To: UFO Mail list <ufo at ufo.chicago.il.us>
> Message-ID: <203383.23440.qm at web112405.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> 
> Are you using the _netdev option in fstab?  It may be
> trying to mount the shares before the network is available.
> 
> Matt

Thanks Matt, 

Since the mounting worked manually from the command line, I kinda figured that something (my guess was a protocol) wasn't ready/loaded when fstab is being processed at start up. 

I tried using the _netdev option in fstab but the drives still won't mount at boot up. I am using cifs and this link 

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab

says _netdev is only available with NFS. NFS would require installing/running and NFS server on the XP side so I'm trying to stick with CIFS. Is there any other way to delay the mounting of the network shares until after the network comes up ? This would be the ideal solution. 

Some people have fixed this issue by running a cron job that checks to see if the share is mounted, and if not, run a script to mount it. This could potentially require a user to wait for the cron job to run in order to access the share, or mount it manually if they don't want to wait till the job runs. Plus I'd have to somehow mentally connect the cron job with the network share. Too cumbersome. 

Others have made a script that runs "sudo mount -a" after everything in the OS is loaded. Not exactly elegant, and it kinda defeats the purpose of putting the commands in fstab. 

What if instead of the script running "sudo mount -a", which remounts everything again, the script contains only commands to mount the network shares ?