"mapping drives"; autofs issues

[James Pifer]

I have a handful of machines running Linux (mostly FC3) and Windows (2K
and XP). On my laptop I have FC3. I'm having a lot of problems with
keeping drives "mapped" or mounted. Here's what I'm currently doing. 

On all the linux machines samba is installed, and my userid has admin
access to root so I can get to the whole drive and pretty much do what I
want. On windows I just use the admin shares. 

On my laptop I'm running autofs and have all the mounts setup in
auto.misc. Right now I'm using fstype=smbfs. The problem is that
sometimes the mount will get hosed up, maybe the other machine crashed
or was not accessible for one reason or another. When this happens I
have to try and figure out how to kill whatever process is hosing it up
so I can try to restart autofs. Sometimes I can do it, other times I
can't. When I can't have to logout or restart completely, very annoying.

On a Windows machine it will not have a problem with the same share.
Windows appears to do a better job of handling this situation. It seems
to more easily reconnect automatically. 

Besides that problem, I've also had problems copying large amounts of
data over these mount points. I don't have any exact errors to quote at
the moment, but they fail consistently. 

I've looked at NFS as an option as well, but I've had permission issues
with that. I'd like to have full access on the drives. Creating a samba
share and granting admin access fits what I want. 

Can anyone suggest any better ways of doing this? I hate to compare it
to windows but on my windows machines I can map the same shares on any
of my other windows machines or Linux machines (using samba), and the
mappings are always accessible or reconnect once the machine in question
is available. 

Any help is appreciated. 

James