Samba time-outs

["Neal Tovsen" <ntovsen@piper.hamline.edu>]

Sorry in advance if this is long-winded, but I'm not sure what could be
causing this issue and didn't want to leave anything out that might matter.

I have a Syquest removable disk that I mount to /mnt/syquest. I use it for
porting stuff from work to home. I've found that if I use Win95 at work to
format the disk, it creates a (I'm not sure if this is the correct term)
partition-less disk, meaning that I mount /dev/sda. For NT to format the
disk, I have to use the disk manager to create a partition before
formatting, which means that in Linux I mount /dev/sda1.

My problem is with releasing the filesystem after use. I have this line in
my /etc/fstab:

/dev/sda  /mnt/syquest  vfat    noauto,user,uid=502,gid=100

This allows me to mount the filesystem in such a way that my default Samba
user (pcguest) has read/write permissions to the disk. Obviously, this
doesn't work for the disks which need to be mounted from /dev/sda1, so I
usually just mount this by explicitly specifying all the parameters when I
use mount.

Here's my problem: When I mount /dev/sda1 from the command line and access
the disk via Samba, I can unmount the disk within seconds of leaving the
/mnt/syquest directory in my Win95 explorer. If I use the fstab entry to
mount /dev/sda, then access the disk via Samba, then attempt to umount, it
tells me that the "device is busy", and won't let me umount it for a VERY
long time. I've never timed it, but it's sometimes at least 10-15 minutes.
If I re-start Samba, I can unmount it immediately.

Since restarting Samba is a PITA, what can I do about this? I didn't see
anything in the smb.conf file to help me.

Neal