On Sat, 16 Feb 2002 10:42:56 Jenny_Hopkins@toby-churchill.com wrote:

[Thinks, what am I doing in at work on a lovely saturday....] Can anyone help me on this?......I mounted a shared directory on my windows machine onto a directory called /jenshare on my linuxbox using smbmount. Then i went home, switched off the windows machine and forgot all about it. Now I have an error coming up right left and centre "File 'jenshare' exists but can not be stat-ed: Input/output error" Doing a ls-l / doesn't show the directory jenshare (I/O error again), however ls -a / does show it. I'm a bit stuffed here....can anyone offer assistance? Thanks. Jenny.

Hi Jenny,

This all sounds quite sensible. The SMB networking protocol used to share network drivers with windows boxes allows idle connections to be closed automatically but the client (in this your Linux box) knows the filesystem is still mounted and will automatically re-connect when someone tries to use it.

So what has happenned here is that Linux thinks the remote windows filesystem is still mounted and therefore it doesn't flush the names on that filesystem from internal caches, hence why some names on that filesystem look to be still there - when you try to open one of the files or get more information on it though Linux tries to re-connect to the windows machine and finds it doesn't respond.

So, to stop the errors you either need to tell Linux you don't need access to that filesystem any more by umounting it, or startup the windows box again so Linux can see it.

Steve.