Unmount Samba filesystems before shutdown or reboot

Merry Christmas, everyone!

This post is essentially an addendum to my earlier post, Mount Samba Shares on a GNU/Linux machine. I found that my system was hanging toward the end of a shutdown because the Samba shares I had mounted weren’t being unmounted properly. I was seeing strange console messages saying things like “CIFS VFS: no response for cmd 50…” and the system would sit there, apparently unresponsive, for several minutes before actually turning off or restarting. I apologize if my earlier post created this problem for anybody.

The solution is to unmount the Samba shares a little earlier in the shutdown process, when networking is still available. This is as easy as adding a couple of symbolic links to the runlevels for shutdown and reboot that point to the /etc/init.d/umountnfs.sh script, which unmounts virtual filesystems.