Oops! Another Samba Panic

[Jerry Krinock]

Well, I did it again.  When I got home this evening I woke up my Powerbook
and found it was really sluggish.  Lots of spinning pizza wheels.  Ooops!!
I remembered that I had connected to a Windows server via the built-in Samba
(OS 10.2.3) and forgot to eject it before I left my day-job.

Sometimes after doing this, if I leave the computer alone it will discover
the problem after about 10 minutes and give me a StopAlert saying that "the
server blah-blah has disconnected".  Then it is back to normal.  Other
times, I end up doing a force relaunch on the Finder, a logout or a restart.
Today it took a restart.

First of all, I'd like to comment that I think this is due to really bad
design and I hope Apple fixes it someday soon.  It's a fact of life that
computers are connected by radio and/or wires and that these things often
break, and that remote servers sometimes shut down, and therefore any
communication protocol should be designed to recognize when links break and
gracefully get on with life after a short timeout.

Second, seeing that we are stuck with this until at least OS 10.2.4, does
anyone know of a reliable way to manually tell this thing to give up on a
disconnected Samba server?  One thing that definitely does not work is to
try and eject it in the Finder after it's been disconnected.  Clicking on a
disconnected Samba server seems to increase the panic.

Jerry Krinock
San Jose,  CA   USA